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 ( W rec ), for high-field applications has dramatically increased year-on-year from 2020 to 2024, as evidenced by over 250 papers, demonstrating ever larger W rec 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 W rec , E max , Δ P , and η , and more importantly, the normalised metrics, W rec / E max and W rec /Δ P 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. This review highlights the remarkable advancements and future trends in bulk ceramics, MLCCs and ceramic thin films for lead-free high field and high energy density capacitors.