Damian Laird

In order to take advantage of the increasing sophistication of technology for harnessing renewable energy resources, serious attention must be paid to how to store and re-access this energy. Electrochemical storage, in the guise of batteries, supercapacitors and pseudocapacitors, has attracted much attention as a viable option for enhanced energy storage applications. But in order for these technologies to be implemented successfully we need to find materials that perform better and are relatively easy to synthesise. Bimetallic transition metal oxides are materials that are readily synthesised and may be multifunctional, i.e. have a role at the electrochemical atomic level as well as the device level. In order for these materials to work efficiently in new generation systems based on sodium and lithium they also need to be mesoporous. This can be achieved by trying to find synthetic techniques that produce specific, highly regulated nanostructures or by adding a ‘templating’ agent during the bulk synthesis step. We have investigated the simple hydrothermal preparation of a number of nickel cobaltate (NiCo2O4) materials using polymer templates, eggshell membrane (ESM) and poly methyl methacrylate (PMMA), as potential electrode materials for supercapacitors. The ESM was expected to act as a fibrous, random polymeric template while the PMMA should produce a much more ordered material. Electrochemical testing showed that the different templates have led to changes in material morphology and these have resulted in a difference in electrochemical properties. Templated materials had an increased specific capacitance than non-templated and the choice of template could influence the capacitance by as much as 30 %.