A new type of composite material with peapod structures can help improve performance of lithium-ion batteries

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Lithium-ion batteries are used to power a wide range of electronic devices, including computers, cameras, digital audio players and calculators. Tremendous effort has been devoted to the development of lithium-ion batteries, especially in improving the efficiency and integrity of the battery electrodes. This is because during the discharging and charging processes, lithium ions are repeatedly incorporated into and extracted from the electrodes by alloy formation or chemical conversion. These recurring events are known to cause the progressive degradation of the electrodes, irreversibly damaging battery performance.

Yu Wang at the A*STAR Institute of Chemical and Engineering Sciences and co-workers have now demonstrated an elegant strategy to reduce the degradation problem and increase the capacity retention of lithium-ion batteries over many charge–discharge cycles. The strategy involves the use of acomposite materialwith a peapod structure comprising cobalt oxide (Co₃O₄) nanoparticles embedded in carbon fibers (see image).

Cobalt oxide is a promising material for anodes in lithium-ion batteries because its capacity for holding ions is higher than that of conventional electrode materials, such as tin. In addition, Co₃O₄can be easily converted to LiCoO₂, which is the material currently used in commercial cathodes. The researchers made the peapod structures by heating cobalt carbonate hydroxide nanobelts coated with layers of polymerized glucose in an inert atmosphere at 700ºC and then in air at 250ºC. Electrodes built using the peapod composite had enhancedlithiumstorage and capacity retention—delivering 91% of the total possible capacity after 50 charge–discharge cycles.

“The Co₃O₄nanoparticles act as active materials to store lithium ions and the hollow carbon fibers protect and prevent the Co3O4 nanoparticles from aggregating and collapsing,” says Wang. Thecarbon fibersalso play the role of conducting electrons from the nanoparticles.

According to Wang, aside from the promising application in lithium-ion batteries, the fabrication of the peapod composite is an achievement in itself, as it is the first time that such isolated magnetic nanoparticles embedded in hollow fibers have been produced. Scanning electron microscopy revealed that the peapod composite exhibits a uniform morphology, with pod lengths of up to several micrometers and pod diameters of as small as 50 nanometers. The researchers believe that their method could be extended to generate encapsulated nanoparticles using a wide range of materials with applications beyond lithium-ion batteries, for example, in gene engineering, catalysis, gas sensing and the manufacture of capacitors and magnets.

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A paperweight for platinum: Bracing catalyst in material makes fuel cell component work better, last longer

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A new combination of nanoparticles and graphene results in a more durable catalytic material for fuel cells, according to work published today online at the Journal of the American Chemical Society. The catalytic material is not only hardier but more chemically active as well. The researchers are confident the results will help improve fuel cell design.

"Fuel cells are an important area of energy technology, but cost and durability are big challenges,"said chemist Jun Liu."The unique structure of this material provides much needed stability, goodelectrical conductivityand other desired properties."

Liu and his colleagues at the Department of Energy's Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, Princeton University in Princeton, N.J., and Washington State University in Pullman, Wash., combined graphene, a one-atom-thick honeycomb of carbon with handy electrical and structural properties, withmetal oxidenanoparticles to stabilize afuel cellcatalystand make it better available to do its job.

"This material has great potential to make fuel cells cheaper and last longer,"said catalytic chemist Yong Wang, who has a joint appointment with PNNL and WSU."The work may also provide lessons for improving the performance of other carbon-based catalysts for a broad range of industrial applications."

Muscle Metal Oxide

Fuel cells work by chemically breaking down oxygen and hydrogen gases to create an electrical current, producing water and heat in the process. The centerpiece of the fuel cell is the chemical catalyst -- usually a metal such asplatinum-- sitting on a support that is often made of carbon. A good supporting material spreads the platinum evenly over its surface to maximize the surface area with which it can attackgas molecules. It is also electrically conductive.

Fuel cell developers most commonly useblack carbon-- think pencil lead -- but platinum atoms tend to clump on such carbon. In addition, water can degrade the carbon away. Another support option is metal oxides -- think rust -- but what metal oxides make up for in stability and catalyst dispersion, they lose in conductivity and ease of synthesis. Other researchers have begun to explore metal oxides in conjunction with carbon materials to get the best of both worlds.

As a carbon support, Liu and his colleagues thought graphene intriguing. The honeycomb lattice of graphene is porous, electrically conductive and affords a lot of room for platinum atoms to work. First, the team crystallized nanoparticles of the metal oxide known as indium tin oxide -- or ITO -- directly onto specially treated graphene. Then they added platinum nanoparticles to the graphene-ITO and tested the materials.

Platinumweight

The team viewed the materials under high-resolution microscopes at EMSL, DOE's Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory on the PNNL campus. The images showed that without ITO, platinum atoms clumped up on the graphene surface. But with ITO, the platinum spread out nicely. Those images also showed catalytic platinum wedged between the nanoparticles and the graphene surface, with the nanoparticles partially sitting on the platinum like a paperweight.

To see how stable this arrangement was, the team performed theoretical calculations of molecular interactions between the graphene, platinum and ITO. This number-crunching on EMSL's Chinook supercomputer showed that the threesome was more stable than the metal oxide alone on graphene or the catalyst alone on graphene.

But stability makes no difference if the catalyst doesn't work. In tests for how well the materials break down oxygen as they would in a fuel cell, the triple-threat packed about 40% more of a wallop than the catalyst alone on graphene or the catalyst alone on other carbon-based supports such as activated carbon.

Last, the team tested how well the new material stands up to repeated usage by artificially aging it. After aging, the tripartite material proved to be three times as durable as the lone catalyst ongrapheneand twice as durable as on commonly used activated carbon. Corrosion tests revealed that the triple threat was more resistant than the other materials tested as well.

The team is now incorporating the platinum-ITO-graphene material into experimental fuel cells to determine how well it works under real world conditions and how long it lasts.

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Solar cells can be made thinner and lighter with the help of aluminum particles

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Solar cells are a key technology in the drive toward cleaner energy production. Unfortunately, solar technology is not yet economically competitive and the cost of solar cells needs to be brought down. One way to overcome this problem is to reduce the amount of expensive semiconductor material used, but thin-film solar cells tend to have lower performance compared with conventional solar cells.

Yuriy Akimov and Wee Shing Koh at the A*STAR Institute of High Performance Computing (Singapore) have now improved the lightconversion efficiencyof thin-film solar cells by depositingaluminumparticles on the cell surface.

Metallicnanoparticlescan direct light better into the solar cell and prevent light from escaping. In conventional‘thick-film’ solar cells, the nanoparticles would have little effect because all the light is absorbed by the film due to its thickness. For thin films, however, the nanoparticles can make a big difference. Their scattering increases the duration the light stays in the film, bringing the total absorption of light up to a level comparable with that for conventional solar cells.”The strategy allows us to reduce the production costs of solar cells by several times and makes photovoltaics more competitive with respect to other forms of power generation,” says Akimov.

The researchers modeled the light absorption efficiency of solar cells for various nanoparticle materials and sizes. In particular, they compared the properties of silver versus aluminum nanoparticles. In most studies on the subject, silver particles have been preferred. These have optical resonances in the visible part of the spectrum that are even better at focusing the light into the solar cell. Unfortunately, there is a tradeoff: the optical resonances also cause the absorption of light by the nanoparticles, which means the solar cell is less efficient.

In the case of silver, this resonance is right in the key part of the solar spectrum, so that light absorption is considerable. But not so for aluminum nanoparticles, where these resonances are outside the important part of the solar spectrum. Furthermore, the aluminum particles handle oxidation well and their properties change little with variations in shape and size. And more importantly, their scattering properties are robust in comparison with silver nanoparticles.“We found that nanoparticles made of aluminum perform better than those made of other metals in enhancing light trapping in thin-film solar cells,” says Akimov.“We believe aluminum particles can help make thin-filmsolar cellscommercially viable.”

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