New projects & Milestones
2020 has been a year for relearning and restructuring our activities. From our R+D projects, to our conferences, dissemination and technology-transfer activities, everything has been touched and modified to adapt to our first global pandemic. Yet, our core activities have been resiliently kept and new science, as well as new scientists, keep coming out of our NEO-Energy Lab.
Dr Daniel Rueda-García defended his PhD Thesis, describing his thorough research on novel materials and approaches for Flow Cells, and then went on to work for Earthdas on the fabrication of nanopaste electrodes. Other academic works completed in 2020 were those of Aiman Chbani (Master’s Degree thesis) and Laia Cots (Bachelor´s Degree thesis). Dr Sara Goberna-Ferrón joined the group as a Beatriu de Pinos post-doc to work on the development of polyoxometalate-decorated metal nanoparticles for energy applications.
In addition to increasing our technology transfer activities, our group has continued working on the fundamentals of our NEO-Energy brand research, namely, hybrid electrode materials for hybrid energy storage, which has allowed us to expand our collaborations and increase our internationalization with groups from Australia, Germany, but also with emerging countries like Malaysia or Brazil. We focused not only on materials, but also on energy storage devices, which we strived to further develop, with emphasis on supercapacitors, batteries and their hybrids.
In 2020 our NATO (Science for Peace) project on “Development of New Cathodes for Stable and Safer Lithium-Sulfur Batteries” was completed and we also continued working on our National (Retos) project on “Hybrid materials and components for supercapacitors and harvesting”. Graphene and graphene-based materials also keep taking a good share of our time, both at the lab and at the technology transfer bench. In 2020 we have developed two GraphCat (GenCat) projects. They involve scaling up and optimizing industrial methods for the preparation of graphene and the use of graphene-related materials for energy storage in supercapacitors in collaboration with IREC and Eurecat.
Finally, we have completed and published our work on the preparation of graphene-like nanocarbons from agrowastes (from winery industry) and its application in the setting-up of a K-ion capacitor cell.
We give more details about each research line in the following paragraphs.
From hybrid materials to hybrid devices for improved energy storage
The boundaries between batteries and capacitors are quickly blurring. Control over nanostructures is of great importance in the design of high-performance energy storage devices. We are developing materials with high specific surfaces, as well as ultradispersed molecular materials for application in electrochemical energy storage devices featuring the best properties of batteries (high energy density) and supercapacitors (high specific power). Two PhD Thesis are presently tackling this topic (Jun-Jie Zhu and Anukriti Pokhriyal) from different points of view. We have recently published an article on the translation of the (aqueous) chemistry of polyoxometalate-nanocarbon hybrids to organic electrolytes, thus allowing for higher voltage and greater energy density.
Graphene and graphene-based devices
Dr Raúl Benages-Vilau has been successfully developing our proprietary method for the fabrication of graphene within the framework of a GraphCat project. Also in this context, and in collaboration with IREC and Eurecat, we have been working on the application of our graphene materials as electrodes in supercapacitors to be integrated in multifunctional sensing devices.
POMs on Metal Nanoparticles
As a new Beatriu de Pinos post-doc, Dr Sara Goberna Ferron has been working on the synthesis of metal nanoparticles (Ag, Au) decorated with polyoxometalates. So far, her work has centered on the preparation of the materials (including covalent modification of the POM clusters). These nanostructured multimaterials are presently being studied for energy storage applications in supercapacitors but they also are potential new catalysts for a variety of reactions. The already mentioned Bachelor’s Degree thesis by Laia Cots, titled “Synthesis and characterization of Polyoxometalate-protected metallic nanoparticles for Energy storage applications” was developed on this topic, as the work of two new students, Marta Perxés, and Miquel Serra, who are developing their MS and BS thesis, respectively.
Harvestorage materials
The coupling of our energy storage devices with harvesting devices was proposed in our strategic plan (as well as in the Severo Ochoa Programme 2018-2022). In 2020 we have initiated this research line by setting up a preliminary triboelectric nanogenerator (TENG), which could eventually be coupled with a supercapacitor. Nevertheless, this is still in the phase of ongoing preliminary work.
From Nanofluids to Nanopastes
In an attempt to increase the concentration of active species in nanofluids, we have gradually evolved to the formulation of nanopastes, which are composites at the molecular level of solid electrode nanoparticles (nanocarbons, inorganics and their hybrids) and electrolytes. We have filed a patent with our spin-off company to exploit these electrodes.
Our materials can be tailor-made for many different applications, but our favourite, and the one we are developing hard in our recent spinoff (Earthdas), takes the form of fast-charging long-lived energy storage devices. In this respect, it should be noted that in addition to the optimization of the micro and nanostructure of our materials, the use of pastes represents an additional challenge that is being tackled through an Industrial PhD (Doctorat Industrial, GenCat) carried out by Verónica Fabián, which underscores the importance of device design.