Local structure engineered lead-free ferroic dielectrics for superior energy-storage capacitors: A review

With the development of energy-storage technology and power electronics industry, dielectric capacitors with high energy density are in high demand owing to their high power density. Especially for ferroic dielectrics (including ferroelectrics and antiferroelectrics) showing dipole moments in the perovskite unit cells, large dielectric response under electric fields makes them own outstanding potentials for achieving high energy-storage density. Particularly, destroying long-range ferroelectric/antiferroelectric ordering by enhancing compositional disorder is found to be effective for extremely improving energy-storage properties (both high recoverable energy-storage density and efficiency), because these macroscopic-nonpolar nanodomains are highly polarizable under strong external electric fields. Moreover, owing to the heterogeneous structure induced dielectric relaxation characteristics, excellent temperature stability can be achieved simultaneously. The recent developments of (anti)polar nanoregions with different possible local symmetries in various lead-free perovskite-structured dielectrics have been summarized in this review, together with the achieved energy-storage properties based on them. This review would provide a guidance for preparing high-performance energy-storage capacitors by local-structure engineering for next-generation pulse power applications.