Topic 01-17 : Tailored oxides and carbides as active materials for high power energy storage devices

The improvement of energy density of high power devices such as electrochemical capacitors strongly relies upon the electrode materials. Despite the huge number of materials proposed as electrodes for supercapacitor and related devices, only few of them depict pseudocapacitive behavior with sufficient capacity to be furthered considered for practical applications. Furthermore, there is always a tradeoff between the mandatory large surface area of such compounds and their crystallinity. Sol-gel techniques are interesting synthesis routes to achieve this goal. More specifically, acrylamide route recently enabled the synthesis of  crystallized multicationic oxides with annealing temperature as low as 350°C. In this work, a similar approach will be used to synthesize multicationic oxides and their electrochemical behavior will be investigated in innovative electrolytes designed by the group of Prof. A. Balducci (Jena).

The work will be focused toward the synthesis of oxides that can be used as negative or positive electrode in asymmetric devices using two different electrode materials. The aim is to couple the oxides that can be operated as the positive electrode with MXenes synthesized by the group of Prof. Simon (Toulouse) used as the negative one. Oxides that can act as negative electrodes will be evaluated as potential candidates to replace MXene. Alternatively, acrylamide route will be used to synthesize MXene precursors as carbides in order to complement the molten salts route developed in Toulouse.

The PhD student will make secondment in Prof. Simon lab in Toulouse to investigate the electrochemical behavior of the synthesized materials using in-depth electrochemical techniques. Furthermore, he/she will also make a secondment at Friedrich Schiller University to study the interfacial reactions between the oxide and carbide-based electrode materials and the innovative electrolytes designed in Jena.

The whole mobility should be about one year total within the three years of the PhD.

Contact

PhD Supervisor : Thierry Brousse (thierry.brousse@univ-nantes.fr)