Publication date: 10th April 2024
Energy storage systems are indispensable to power electric devices such as mobile phones, electric vehicles, and smart grids. Lithium-ion battery dominates the largest segment of the energy storage system market owing to its high energy density and long cycle life. However, flammable organic liquid electrolytes are used in lithium-ion batteries, which is an essential risk of fire and explosion accidents. Substituting water solvent for organic solvent directly approaches the safety issue. In particular, using proton as a charge carrier enables denser charge storage in electrode materials compared with other cations because proton possesses the smallest ionic radius. Therefore, aqueous proton battery is enthusiastically developed as an alternative to lithium-ion batteries.1
In general, acidic electrolyte shows intense hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) just below 0 V vs SHE because of its high activity of proton. To suppress HER in aqueous rechargeable batteries, molecular crowding electrolytes can be used, where mixed crowding agents (macromolecules or small hydrophilic molecules) reduces activities of H2O/H3O+ at electrode-electrolyte interfaces.2,3 Meanwhile, active materials should also possess high durability against physical and chemical change upon charge/discharge. Especially, large volume expansion/shrinkage usually raise intra-particle cracking on active materials, which exacerbates parasitic reactions at electrode-electrolyte interfaces.
In this presentation, we show that Mo3Nb2O14 exhibits reversible five-proton intercalation in an acidic molecular crowding electrolyte. The strain-free nature of Mo3Nb2O14 upon charge/discharge per the formula unit (ΔV/V < 0.5%) is confirmed by 1H solid-state nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, X-ray absorption spectroscopy, X-ray diffraction, atomic-resolution scanning transmission electron microscopy, and density functional theory calculations. As a consequence, intra-particle cracking is suppressed on Mo3Nb2O14 particles, which minimizes HER to achieve high Coulombic efficiencies (> 99.7%). Finally, a full-cell that consists of the Mo3Nb2O14 anode, the prussian blue analogue vanadium hexacyanoferrate cathode 4, and the acidic molecular crowding electrolyte retains 98.5% of the initial specific capacity after 1000 cycles.
This study was financially supported by the Core Research for Evolutional Science and Technology (CREST) program (No. JPMJCR21O6) from JST, and the Kazuchika Okura Memorial Foundation.
nanoGe is a prestigious brand of successful science conferences that are developed along the year in different areas of the world since 2009. Our worldwide conferences cover cutting-edge materials topics like perovskite solar cells, photovoltaics, optoelectronics, solar fuel conversion, surface science, catalysis and two-dimensional materials, among many others.
Previously nanoGe Spring Meeting (NSM) and nanoGe Fall Meeting (NFM), MATSUS is a multiple symposia conference focused on a broad set of topics of advanced materials preparation, their fundamental properties, and their applications, in fields such as renewable energy, photovoltaics, lighting, semiconductor quantum dots, 2-D materials synthesis, charge carriers dynamics, microscopy and spectroscopy semiconductors fundamentals, etc.
International Conference on Hybrid and Organic Photovoltaics
International Conference on Hybrid and Organic Photovoltaics (HOPV) is celebrated yearly in May. The main topics are the development, function and modeling of materials and devices for hybrid and organic solar cells. The field is now dominated by perovskite solar cells but also other hybrid technologies, as organic solar cells, quantum dot solar cells, and dye-sensitized solar cells and their integration into devices for photoelectrochemical solar fuel production.
Asia-Pacific International Conference on Perovskite, Organic Photovoltaics and Optoelectronics
The main topics of the Asia-Pacific International Conference on Perovskite, Organic Photovoltaics and Optoelectronics (IPEROP) are discussed every year in Asia-Pacific for gathering the recent advances in the fields of material preparation, modeling and fabrication of perovskite and hybrid and organic materials. Photovoltaic devices are analyzed from fundamental physics and materials properties to a broad set of applications. The conference also covers the developments of perovskite optoelectronics, including light-emitting diodes, lasers, optical devices, nanophotonics, nonlinear optical properties, colloidal nanostructures, photophysics and light-matter coupling.
The International Conference on Perovskite Thin Film Photovoltaics Perovskite Photonics and Optoelectronics (NIPHO) is the best place to hear the latest developments in perovskite solar cells as well as on recent advances in the fields of perovskite light-emitting diodes, lasers, optical devices, nanophotonics, nonlinear optical properties, colloidal nanostructures, photophysics and light-matter coupling.