Advanced High Temperature Dielectric Material

Active Signal Technologies and Alfred University have brought together a broad-based industrial consortium to rapidly advance the development and commercialization of bismuth sodium titanate (BNT), a novel high performance capacitor material for use in both high-temperature and high-field applications. While the dielectric properties of our Phase I BNT show great promise, this is a new-comer to the capacitor field and will have to prove itself on more than just superior electrical performance. Reliability and uniformity are particularly critical -- specifically, ceramic capacitors exhibit adverse failure modes (notably cracking) in demanding applications, and wider variation in electrical properties than desired when operated at high field. Accordingly, the principal driving force behind the materials development is a reliability effort incorporating both model-based fundamental understanding of the failure mechanisms and experimental quantification and characterization of the failures. All of the compositional and processing optimization is guided by the results from this reliability study. Optimized materials from the lab development are scaled-up on actual production equipment using industrially accepted powder manufacturing techniques and then supplied to Lockheed Martin to make the large tube shaped blocking capacitor needed for the high-temperature commercial process, and to Novacap to produce high-field multilayer capacitors.