Relaxor ferroelectrics are materials with ferroelectric properties and high electrostriction (i.e., the ability to contract or deform in response to electric fields). These materials can be used to create highly efficient energy storage devices, such as capacitors.
Capacitors are key electronic components composed of two electrical conductors with a given distance between them. These components can temporarily store electric charge, reducing the noise transmitted by individual integrated circuits (ICs) and thus improving the overall performance of electronics.
Researchers at Tsinghua University and other institutes in China recently introduced a new strategy to engineer effective relaxor ferroelectrics for energy storage devices. Their paper, introduced in Nature Energy, suggests using a so-called configurational entropy to evaluate the local inhomogeneity of a relaxor's composition.
"Relaxor ferroelectrics are the primary candidates for high-performance energy storage dielectric capacitors," Bingbing Yang, Qinghua Zhang, and their researchers wrote in their paper. "A common approach to tuning the relaxor properties is to regulate the local compositional inhomogeneity, but there is a lack of a quantitative evaluation way for compositional fluctuation in relaxors. Here we propose configurational entropy as an index for the quantitative evaluation of local compositional inhomogeneity."
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