Graphene—a single-atom-thick sheet of carbon atoms—is being built into batteries and supercapacitors to store energy more efficiently. The problem is that most "graphene" used in energy storage today is poor quality and inconsistently shaped, and researchers rarely control how it is arranged inside a device. This means graphene's theoretical advantages—high surface area and conductivity—are not realised in practice. The project aims to fix that by iteratively designing, manufacturing, and testing graphene-based electrodes. If successful, the work could improve how renewable energy is stored and released, making solar and wind power more practical for the national grid. It could also lead to longer-lasting batteries for phones and laptops, and more powerful supercapacitors for applications that need rapid bursts of energy, such as electric vehicle acceleration or grid stabilisation. This is applied materials science with a clear engineering goal: to turn a promising laboratory material into a reliable component for real-world energy storage. The research does not promise a breakthrough tomorrow, but it directly addresses the gap between graphene's potential and its current performance in devices.
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Graphene is a one-atom-thick sheet of carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb lattice. The exceptional physical properties of graphene have attracted enormous interest since its experimental isolation and initial characterisation in 2004, notably its intrinsically high surface area and its unique electronic properties, as manifested by through its high conductivity. Amongst the myriad applications foreseen for this material, exploitation in electrochemical energy storage with supercapacitors or batteries ranks as one of the most prominent. De-carbonising the national, and indeed global, energy supply is a goal driven by rising fossil fuel prices and concerns over air pollution and anthropogenic climate change. For such de-carbonisation to make greater use of "renewable" energy sources requires new methods of storing and converting that energy. This general background, along with the widespread increase in usage of personal electronic apparatus (mobile phones, lap-tops) has driven an enormous renewal of interest and development of electrochemical (battery and supercapacitor based) energy storage, which is the technological motivation for this project. Ironically, such (potentially) de-carbonised energy stores are highly dependent on carbon as a constituent storage material. Supercapacitors are based on the storage of electrical energy within the electrical double-layer formed at high surface area electrodes, whereas certain types of battery are dependent on carbon, either as one of the electrodes or as a conducting additive used to complete the circuit to the electrodes. There are considerable challenges to be addressed en route to incorporating graphene into these energy storage devices however: two specific problems, apparent in much of the vast body of recent work on graphene and energy storage, are: (a) the "graphene" is generally of poor quality and variable dimensions, and (b) frequently only minimal effort is made to control the architecture of the graphene in the resultant device. Consequently, we are still some way off the routine incorporation of graphene within battery and supercapacitor electrodes, as either composites for immobilisation or conductivity, or as primary electrode materials. The goal of this proposal is to remedy these deficiencies by iteratively designing, manufacturing and testing graphene-based batteries and supercapacitors.
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