Electrochemical Energy Storage: A Survey of Our Research Group Activities over the Past Two Decades

Global consumption of fossil fuels for the generation of energy has come at a cost to the natural environment and a negative impact on human health. Developing efficientenergy conversion and storage technologies is thus highly demanding in an era where energy plays an essential role in our everyday lives. The demand for renewable and clean energy from the sun and the other clean energy sources is rapidly increasing. Nevertheless, the intermittent nature of the renewable sources of energy calls for the development of efficient energy storage devices that can deliver energy upon demand. Currently, the dominating energy storage devices are batteries and electrochemical capacitors, also known as supercapacitors. In this talk, I go through the steps that my research group has taken over the past two decades on the ways of developing advanced electrode active materials for electrochemical energy storage. We started our research activities with developing polymer-based rechargeable batteries [1] and then continued with fabricating dry and wet batteries in a bipolar configuration. We then developed variety of metal-based, conducting polymers and advanced carbon-based nanostructures [2] for supercapacitive energy storage. We also utilized a regenerative mechanism, via a catalytic interaction at the electrode-electrolyte interface, to supply additional charge [3]. In our recent studies, we have utilized advanced materials such as metal-organic frameworks (MOF) and layered-double hydroxides (LDH) for supercapacitive energy storage. It is my hope that these strategies would help us to take a step forward towards the development of advanced energy storage devices for state-of-the-art applications. You can find my research activities via the Google Scholar link [4].