Cleaning up Hybrid Battery Electrodes Improves Capacity and Lifespan

Estimated reading time: 5 minutes

The team found that the POM hybrid electrodes made with soft-landing had superior energy storage capacity. They could hold a third more energy than the carbon nanotube supercapacitors by themselves, which were included as a minimum performance benchmark. And soft-landing hybrids held about 27 percent more energy than conventionally made electrospray deposited electrodes.

To make sure the team was using the optimal amount of POM, they made hybrid electrodes using different amounts and tested which one resulted in the highest capacity. Soft-landing produced the highest capacity overall using the lowest amount of POM. This indicated the electrodes used the active material extremely efficiently. In comparison, conventional, sodium-based POM electrodes required twice as much POM material to reach their highest capacity.

The conventionally-made devices used more POM, but the team couldn't count them out yet. They might in fact have a longer lifespan than the soft-landing produced electrodes. To test that, the team charged and discharged the hybrids 1,000 times and measured how long they lasted.

As they did in the previous tests, the soft-landing-based devices performed the best, losing only a few percent capacity after 1000 cycles. The naked supercapacitors came in second, and the sodium-based, conventionally made devices lost about double the capacity of the soft-landed devices. This suggests that the soft-landing method has the potential to double the lifespan of these types of hybrid batteries.

Looking good

The team was surprised that it took so little of the POM material to make such a big difference to the carbon nanotube supercapacitors. By weight, the amount of POM was just one-fifth of a percent of the amount of carbon nanotube material.

"The fact that the capacitance reaches a maximum with so little POM, and then drops off with more, is remarkable," said Laskin. "We didn't expect such a small amount of POM to be making such a large contribution to the capacitance."

They decided to examine the structure of the electrodes using powerful microscopes in EMSL, the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, a DOE Office of Science User Facility at PNNL. They compared soft-landing with the conventionally made, sodium-POM electrodes.

Soft-landing created small discrete clusters of POM dotting the carbon nanotubes, but the conventional method resulted in larger clumps of POM clusters swamping out the nanotubes, aggregates up to ten times the size of those made by soft-landing.

This result suggested to the researchers that removing the positive ions from the POM starting material allowed the negative ions to disperse evenly over the surface. As long as the positive ions such as sodium remained, the POM and sodium appear to reform the crystalline material and aggregate on the surface. This prevented much of the POM from doing its job in the battery, thereby reducing capacity.

When the team zoomed out a little and viewed the nanotubes from above, the conventionally made electrodes were covered in large aggregates of POM. The soft-landed electrodes, however, were remarkably indistinguishable from the naked carbon nanotube supercapacitors.

In future research, the team wants to explore how to get the carbon materials to accept more POM, which might increase capacity and lifespan even further.

This work was supported by the Department of Energy Office of Science and the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research, a Department of Energy Innovation Hub.

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