The focus of this project is the development of supercapacitors from sustainable, recyclable and/or biodegradable materials. . This addresses issues of electronic waste and sustainability associated with batteries, currently the dominant technology for portable electric devices, vehicles and distributed energy storage. Supercapacitors are an electrochemical energy storage technology with high cyclability and are particularly amenable to the use of non-toxic, earth-abundant materials and sustainable processes in their production. Hierarchically-nanostructured pseudocapacitive electrode materials will be explored to address low energy density and high resistances which are problematic in existing 'green supercapacitors' Two approaches will be adopted and combined as the project progresses both: (1) development of sustainable composite electrodes incorporating pseudocapactive materials in which faradaic processes store charge in addition to the electric double layer. The usual cost of increased charge storage is materials degradation under cycling, which will be addressed by nanostructuring the active material and supporting with a scaffold. (2) surface functionalization through electrolyte composition, which has been very recently suggested as a route to substantially increasing the aqueous electrolyte voltage window - an approach that has yet to be fully explored for conventional carbon electrode materials, let alone for the pseudocapacitive materials to be explored in this project.

A range of analytical techniques will be employed in the project including electrochemical analysis, analytical electron microscopy, tomography and Raman spectroscopy giving the student a thorough grounding in basic techniques appropriate for energy materials.