Stress Engineering of Perovskite Ceramics for Enhanced Piezoelectricity and Temperature Stability toward Energy Harvesting
Xiaole Yu, Yudong Hou, Mupeng Zheng, Mankang Zhu
Abstract
Piezoelectric energy harvesting as an available technology for realizing self-powered microsensors has attracted increasing attention. However, the combination of large piezoelectricity and high-temperature stability is a huge challenge in perovskite ceramics for developing piezoelectric energy harvesters (PEHs) toward wide-temperature applications. Herein, a stress engineering strategy was proposed to address this problem by combining lattice stress and heterogeneous interface stress. Based on this concept, (Ni0.9Zn0.1)TiO3-modified Pb[(Zn1/3Nb2/3)0.2(Zr1/2Ti1/2)0.8]O3 ceramic achieves both enhanced piezoelectricity and high-temperature stability (d33 = 485 pC/N ± 20%) over a wide temperature range of 24–250 °C, superior to the pristine counterpart and many state-of-the-art commercial lead zirconate titanate-based ceramics. This benefits from the hierarchical domains with high piezoelectric activity and temperature stability caused by stress engineering. Furthermore, the assembled corresponding PEH not only successfully drives a wireless monitoring and alarm system but also exhibits considerable power generation capacities (e.g., power density of up to 98.8 μW/cm3) even at 250 °C. Our work may provide a pathway for developing high-performance perovskite materials with high piezoelectricity and thermal reliability toward high-temperature piezoelectric energy harvesting.