Nano-Enabled Metal Oxide Varistors for Surge Protection

Commercial Metal Oxide Varistor (MOV) devices provide a combination of high voltage, peak current, pulse energy absorption, and fast response speed. The non-uniformity and defects, however, may lead to relatively low voltage and energy dissipation, high leakage, low reliability and mechanical cracking. GE Global Research has been studying NanoMOV technology, and has been developing new formulations and processes. New compositions were invented to enable sintering at much lower temperatures, which exhibits improved I-V characteristics and microstructure uniformity. These compositions not only show high resistance at low fields and breakdown voltage (1-5kV/mm), but also a large alpha at high fields (50-140). The higher breakdown strength (>10x) compared to commercially available MOVs will enable MOV miniaturization, high voltage surge protection, and open up new areas of usage.