Single material with multiple interfaces: A key one dimensional barium titanate filler for enhancing energy density in polymer nanocomposite

The increasing demand of energy and its storage devices in consumer electronics requires high energy density capacitors. In this context, we proposed a filler of single material with multiple interfaces to enhance the energy density in polymer nanocomposite film. The core-shell polydopamine (PDA) coated BaTiO3 (BT) incorporated in 1D BT architecture filler was prepared by the electrospinning process. In order to investigate the effect of the interfaces, the poly(vinylidene-chlorotrifluoroethylene) (P(VDF-CTFE)) nanocomposite films of a fixed filler (BT, PDA coated BT and 1D core-shell BT) concentration were prepared. The introduction of a ferroelectric filler induces an electroactive phase in P(VDF-CTFE), leading to dielectric constant enhancement by 135% in nanocomposite film. This enhancement in dielectric constant is due to the increased polarizability of nanocomposite film, which was verified by the finite element analysis of electric field distribution. The ferroelectric (polarization vs electric field) loop measurement indicates that the multi-interfaced ferroelectric filler based nanocomposite film exhibits increased maximum polarization of 14.3 μC/cm2, breakdown strength of 5000 kV/cm and improved energy density of 9.9 J/cm3. It implying that an enormous increment (371%) of energy storage as compared to commercial biaxially orientated polypropylene (2.1 J/cm3).