Stress Engineering of Perovskite Ceramics for Enhanced Piezoelectricity and Temperature Stability toward Energy Harvesting

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.