Electrochemical Energy Storage: Challenges and opportunities

The money that we paid out of pocket for fossil fuels, e.g. gasoline, oil, and natural gas, doesn’t reflect the total cost of fossil-based fuels to each of us, as consumption of fossil fuels comes at a cost of serious impact to natural environment and human health. As such, development of efficient energy conversion technologies from renewable sources of energy, such as sun and wind, are highly demanding. However, the intermittent nature of the renewable sources of energy necessitates development of advanced energy storage systems as a grant opportunity. Currently, batteries and supercapacitors are the two widely used energy storage devices, which the former provides a high energy density and the latter offers a high power density and long cycle lives. Technological advancement of energy storage devices lies on the development of single energy storage devices that bring both high energy and power densities along with a long cycle life.Cost, energy and power performance, safety, calendar and cycle life, and operating temperature range are among the challenges that energy storage devices are face with. Although the requirements for the cost and performance vary with the applications, these two parameters are the most common challenges for all the energy storage devices. Performance of the energy storage devices strongly depends on the electrode active materials. Despite the great successes being made, performance improvement still remains as a challenge. Energy and power performance of the supercapacitors depends on operating potential window of the electrolyte as E=1/2 CV^2. As such, one of the remaining challenges is to develop safe electrolytes with a wide operating potential window. The total weight of an energy storage device is also one of the critical parameters. To cope with this challenge, development of regenerative mechanisms for multiple use of the electrode active materials could be an appealing solution. Self-discharge is another challenge that energy storage devices, especially supercapacitors, are facing. One of the best solutions is to confine redox active species on the solid-state electrode active materials. In this talk, I will discuss some of my research group s past and present studies on the development of advanced electrode active materials for energy storage devices. With a precise and deliberate selection of the electrode active materials and the electrolyte, along with a deep look into the basic principles of the energy storage phenomenon, we try to provide a viable solution to the bottleneck of energy storage technology. I hope that these strategies along with the activities that others have made would help the energy storage community to take a step forward towards a more sustainable energy future. My research activities can be find via the Google Scholar link provided in Ref. 1 [1].