Davoud Dastan and Professor Hamid Garmestani paper's entitled ''Fabrication of core-shell structured Ni@BaTiO3 scaffolds for polymer composites with ultrahigh dielectric constant and low loss” (published October 2019, vol. 125) has been selected as the winning paper of the 2021 “Composites Part A” journal Highly Cited Paper Award.

This award is presented annually and recognizes the high citation impact of articles published in the journal. In addition, the award carries a monetary prize for the authors of the paper. This paper has been indexed as a Highly Cited and Hot Paper (top 0.1% and key paper in the field) by Web of Science for over one year continuously and received >100 citations in the first year of its publication. 

Dastan and co-workers made a breakthrough in the dielectric energy-storage capacity of nanocomposites. They developed a novel design of dielectric composites consisting of core-shell structured porous Ni@BaTiO3 scaffolds infiltrated with epoxy. Dastan et al demonstrated that the dielectric constants of the composites could be as high as 6397@10 kHz, which is approximately 1777 times higher than pure epoxy matrix (εr ≈ 3.6@10 kHz). Meanwhile, the dielectric loss (tanδ ≈ 0.04@10 kHz) remains comparable to that of pure epoxy (tanδ ≈ 0.01@ 10 kHz). They further reported that that the strong charge accumulation and interfacial polarizations on the huge interfaces, especially the Ni/BaTiO3 and Ni/epoxy interfaces, give arise to the substantially enhanced εr. Additionally, they reported that the sintered insulating BaTiO3 coating can block the transportation of charge carriers, resulting in the low loss. The ultrahigh dielectric constants and low loss make these composites promising candidates for microstrip antennas, field-effect transistors and dielectric capacitors.