Accelerated aging methods for evaluating carbon electrode materials

Accelerated aging methods are likely being adopted within the research laboratory in an effort to build on the collaborative efforts between industry and academia. These “quick test” methods are useful inasmuch one does not have several months to evaluate whether or not an electrode material will fail similarly as compared with another. A question more difficult to answer by these particular methods is how the electrode material actually failed. Despite this obvious drawback accelerated testing methods are becoming standard practice in many research laboratories and this is especially true for research groups investigating energy storage technologies such as capacitors and batteries. This work is aimed towards comparatively identifying the benefits of a particular aging method used for evaluating performance and reliability of graphite electrodes in an aqueous electrochemical system.