Tunable permittivity in polymer composites filled with Si-based semiconductors by regulating induced polarization

Induced polarization shows a significant influence on dielectric permittivity of 0–3 polymer composites containing Si-based semi-conductive fillers. The nature of induced polarization is the increased electric conductivity or decreased band gap in Si-based semi-conductive fillers. In this work, the dependence of induced polarization onto particle size of α-SiC filler together with polarity of polymer matrix and Si-based semi-conductive filler has been elaborately investigated by detecting the permittivity of composites. It was found that increasing the grain size of SiC filler, improving the polarity of polymer matrix and reducing the band-gap of Si-based semi-conductive filler could favor the enhancement of the overall induced polarity in the composites. As a result, the significantly improved dielectric permittivity of composites higher than both of the neat polymer and filler was observed depending on the constituents of the composites. The highest dielectric permittivity of ~215@1 kHz was achieved in poly(vinyl alcohol) based composite filled with 60 vol% of 12 µm SiC particles. The dielectric permittivity of these 0–3 composites could be well tuned in a wide range through altering their constituents. This work might open a facile route to obtain the promising high-performance dielectric composite materials by regulating the degree of induced polarization.