Inorganic ferroelectric thin films and their composites for flexible electronic and energy device applications: current progress and perspectives

Abstract

Scientific researches are at the inception of flexible energy devices and ferroelectric (FE) materials mark their signature in the process. Particularly, devices based on inorganic FE (IFE) materials find a remarkable role in the flexible energy devices such as energy harvesters, infrared (IR) sensors, and energy storage capacitors because the latest technologies are particularly concentrated on self-powered flexible sensors and energy harvesters for a sustainable world. Moreover, the combination of IFE with organic/ inorganic polymers in flexible devices seem to satisfy the requirement of high mechanical strength, piezoelectric coefficient, pyroelectric coefficient, and energy storage properties essential for harvesting, sensing, and storing applications, respectively. In this review article, a systematic analysis of the flexible IFE based energy materials are presented. Starting with a brief introduction about the energy generation in dielectric materials, followed by the importance of IFEs, and the current state-of-the-art of IFE based flexible materials in harvesting energy, IR sensing, and storing energy capacity are discussed. Last but not the least, the existing challenges and future perspectives to facilitate high quality flexible IFEs devices for the real-world applications are envisaged.