Current development, optimisation strategies and future perspectives for lead-free dielectric ceramics in high field and high energy density capacitors

To meet the United Nations' sustainable development goal of affordable and clean energy, there has been a growing need for low-cost, green, and safe energy storage technologies. High-field and energy-density capacitors have gained substantial attention from academics and industry, particularly for power electronics, where they will play a key role in optimising the performance of management systems in electric vehicles. The key figure of merit, energy density (Wrec), for high-field applications has dramatically increased year-on-year from 2020 to 2024, as evidenced by over 250 papers, demonstrating ever larger Wrec values. This review briefly introduces the background and principles of high energy density ceramics, but its focus is to provide constructive and comprehensive insight into the evaluation of Wrec, Emax, ΔP, and η, and more importantly, the normalised metrics, Wrec/Emax and Wrec/ΔP in lead-free dielectric ceramics. We also present several optimisation strategies for materials modification and process innovation that have been recently proposed before providing perspectives for the further development of high-field and high-energy density capacitors.