2015-Sustainable Industrial Processing Summit
SIPS 2015 Volume 10: Mineral & Secondary Battery
| Editors: | Kongoli F, Silva AC, Arol AI, Kumar V, Aifantis K |
| Publisher: | Flogen Star OUTREACH |
| Publication Year: | 2015 |
| Pages: | 340 pages |
| ISBN: | 978-1-987820-33-1 |
| ISSN: | 2291-1227 (Metals and Materials Processing in a Clean Environment Series) |
< CD shopping page
Application of Carbon Nanomaterials in Energy Storage Systems
Ali Kamali1; Vasant Kumar1; Derek Fray2;1UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE, Cambridge, United Kingdom (Great Britain); 2DEPARTMENT OF MATERIALS SCIENCE AND METALLURGY, UNIVERSITY OF CAMBRIDGE, CAMBRIDGE, Cambridge, United Kingdom (Great Britain);
Type of Paper: Regular
Id Paper: 406
Topic: 14
Abstract:
Carbon nanomaterials including carbon nanotubes and graphene will play a crucial role in the next-generation of energy storage devices. In lithium ion batteries, graphite is the traditional anode material due to its excellent cycle life. However, graphite has a theoretical maximum capacity of 372 mAh/g which is not enough for high energy Li-ion batteries. Metallic and intermetallic anode materials can provide much higher theoretical capacity than graphite, but suffer from high volume changes during battery cycling, leading to premature degradation of the anode after a few cycles. In order to overcome this problem, new classes of hybrid metal-carbon nanostructures have been developed and evaluated as anode active materials, and some of them have shown promising results. In lithium-sulfur batteries, sulfur serves as the active cathode material with a theoretical specific capacity of 1672mAh/g. However, various challenges are associated with sulfur electrode including low electrical conductivity of sulfur, dissolution of polysulfides in electrolyte and volume expansion of sulphur during discharge, causing poor cycle life, low specific capacity and low energy efficiency. The successful incorporation of carbon nanomaterials into the cathode structure can improve the electroconductivity, and also provides an effective electron conduction path and structural integrity. This paper reviews the achievements in utilisation of carbon nanomaterials in energy storage devices. Moreover, the activities carried out in the Materials Chemistry Group at Cambridge towards scalable synthesis of carbon nanotubes, graphene and metal filled carbon nanostructures, and their application in energy storage devices are presented.