Engineering the Defects and Microstructures in Ferroelectrics for Enhanced/Novel Properties: An Emerging Way to Cope with Energy Crisis and Environmental Pollution

In the past century, ferroelectrics are well known in electroceramics and microelectronics for their unique ferroelectric, piezoelectric, pyroelectric, and photovoltaic effects. Nowadays, the advances in understanding and tuning of these properties have greatly promoted a broader application potential especially in energy and environmental fields, by harvesting solar, mechanical, and heat energies. For example, high piezoelectricity and high pyroelectricity can be designed by defect or microstructure engineering for piezo- and pyro-catalyst, respectively. Moreover, highly piezoelectric and broadband (UV–Vis–NIR) light-responsive ferroelectrics can be designed via defect engineering, giving rise to a new concept of photoferroelectrics for efficient photocatalysis, piezocatalysis, pyrocatalysis, and related cocatalysis. This article first summarizes the recent developments in ferroelectrics in terms of piezoelectricity, pyroelectricity, and photovoltaic effects based on defect and microstructure engineering. Then, the potential applications in energy generation (i.e., photovoltaic effect, H₂ generation, and self-powered multisource energy harvesting and signal sensing) and environmental protection (i.e., photo-piezo-pyro- cocatalytic dye degradation and CO₂ reduction) are reviewed. Finally, the outlook and challenges are discussed. This article not only covers an overview of the state-of-art advances of ferroelectrics, but also prospects their applications in coping with energy crisis and environmental pollution.