Low-Cost Ceramic Nano-Encapsulation Technologies for Highly-Tunable High Temperature Capacitors

This SBIR project will focus on producing novel, tunable dielectric materials that are expected to produce significantly improved high temperature capacitors for a number of DC- link, hybrid vehicle, and pulse and power electronic applications. There are a number of important new advantages in these new materials such as higher reliability, positive voltage dependence, higher permittivity, higher resistivity, and maybe the most attractive of all for commercialization is the ability to co-process with nickel or copper electrodes, and avoid the very high cost of silver, gold or platinum. The overall objective of this project is to significantly improve the performance, cost and lifetime of ceramic capacitors available today. Novel NaNbO3 and NaNbO3-NaTaO3 ceramic dielectric materials have recently been discovered with much higher performance, and can be used at high temperatures, than conventional dielectrics. These new dielectrics will be paired with passivated Ni and Cu base metal electrode powders coated with up to 10 nanometers of Al2O3 to allow these low cost conductors to supplant silver, gold and platinum used today and significantly reducing advanced capacitor costs. Finally device-level coatings will be deployed to improve the long-term corrosion resistance of the components, in order to significantly extend product lifetimes even in harsh environments. This team will produce its own dielectric materials, apply nanoscale coatings onto a wide array of materials, apply ceramic processing steps to form dielectric layers, fabricate complete capacitor devices, and carry out testing before and after accelerated aging steps. Future power distribution and energy storage systems, medical devices and even electronic weapons will depend on advances in dielectric materials with high energy and power densities. Since capacitors occupy & gt; 30% of the overall volume in conventional power converters and pulse power systems, capacitor performance, size, and reliability must be dramatically improved to meet the requirements of current and future systems. This project will address all these issues.