Research Projects

In comparison to the Indian scientific community, other developed countries focus on research for increasing the storage capacity of lithium and sodium-ion batteries as well as supercapacitors. The main challenge for battery technology is to control the current density while charging and discharging the battery. This power density mainly depends on electrodes, electrolytes, and separators that we use while constructing of battery. Life, Reliability, Sustainability, and Safety are also major factors that have to be considered during the fabrication of a battery. Likewise, the main challenge faced by supercapacitor technology is its energy density having a present value is ≤ 10 Whkg¹. Ragone plot shows that the energy density of the batteries is around 10-150 Wh/kg whereas the supercapacitor energy density is only around 0.1-15Wh/kg. By studying of above problems faced by ion batteries and supercapacitor technology, the properties of MXene and its composite show a way to resolve it on the right path. As the different 2D materials face restacking issues, the MXene nanosheet also faces the same. These issues highly affect the ion transportation between the electrodes resulting in lower electrochemical performance. This limitation was overcome by the separation of a large number of MXene flakes by different processes such as delamination, sonication, exfoliation, etc. This provides a large surface area for ion absorption on electrode material resulting in an increase in the performance. Also, 1 to 1.5 nm space between the MXene nanosheets provides a large area for intercalation of ions in MXene sheets. MXene possesses outstanding electrical conductivity to other metal oxides, resulting in high power density. Also, the capacitance of metal nitrides is very large as compared to carbon materials and metal oxides, which is the key component for increasing the energy density. MXene also has higher stability compared to its other counterparts. In the view of increasing the porosity of the electrode material, it is derived that the formation of a composite of MXene with porous materials such as porous carbon, activated carbon, silica, etc. resulted with enlarge the distance between the MXene layers and increase the surface area of the active material. Increasing the interlayer distance between the MXene layers provides ensuring easy ion and electrolyte infiltration results with both high capacitance and attractive rate performance. Likewise, MXene plays the role of conductive, and electrochemically active binder, eliminating the need for insulated polymer binder for the fabrication of electrodes which maintains the high energy and power density of supercapacitor with higher capacitance without the use of polymer binder. By study, it is proven that an appropriate match of electrolyte with MXene and its composites electrode controlling the charge-storage mechanism is possible resulting in a superior electrochemical performance for supercapacitor application.

MXene, Battery, Supercapacitor, electrochemical storage