Significant Improvement in Magnetic and Magnetoelectric Characteristics of (0.95 − x)Ba0.9Ca0.1TiO3-0.05Na0.5Bi0.5TiO3-xCoFe2O4 Ceramics

Multifunctional materials with high magnetic, electrical, and magnetoelectric (ME) characteristics play an important role in development of data storage devices. Herein, multi-phase ( $0.95- x$ )Ba_0.9Ca_0.1TiO₃ (BCT)-0.05Na_0.5Bi_0.5TiO₃ (NBT)- $x$ CoFe₂O₄ (CFO) ceramics were prepared by a two-stage mechanochemical activation technique. The objective of this study is to develop a multifunctional material with improved multiferroic characteristics. The structural analysis by the Rietveld method shows the presence of heterogeneous structure without any impurity phase. The incorporation of CFO in 0.95BCT-0.05NBT has resulted in significant improvement in magnetic and ME characteristics without significantly hampering the electrical properties. The sample with $x =0.11$ has shown high saturation magnetization of 8.26 emu/g along with moderately high ME coefficient of 5.411 mV/cm $\cdot $ Oe. In addition, the energy storage performance of all the studied samples has also been investigated and the optimized sample $x =0.11$ presents a large discharge energy density of 2.249 J/cm³ and moderately high energy efficiency of 63.8% at 388 kV/cm. The results obtained in this work suggest a significant influence of CFO substitution on the magnetic characteristics of BCT-NBT ceramics, which subsequently indicate their potential applications in spintronics, magnetic memory storage, and electrical energy storage devices.