Research Projects

Transition of the fossil fuel-based to clean energy is crucial for sustainability. Energy storage technology from renewable sources has significant importance. Among the various Energy storage technologies, supercapacitors have gained much attention and considered as next generation energy storage materials. Supercapacitor makes one of the components of this technology which needs to be highly conducting for fast charge-discharge, high surface area for energy storage, and high electrochemical stability for long cycle lifetimes. Traditionally, most widely used materials as supercapacitors are porous carbons owing to their aforementioned properties. However, characterization and controlling the structures of these materials are challenging. Moreover, there are limited scopes to introduce new chemical functionalities which significantly reduces their versatilities. At this point metal-organic framework (MOF) comes into play, hybrid solids which is highly crystalline, porous and thermally stable. Although, MOFs are inherently insulator however, recently conductive MOFs and approaches to improve their conductivity were realized. The conductivity in the MOFs are govern by factors such as (i) extent of conjugation and (ii) types of the coordinating atom. Again, judicious selection of the metal centre becomes vital considering the fact that nature of metal ion has significant role in extent of M-L orbitals overlap. Thus MOFs have significant potential as supercapacitor materials as these materials fulfil all the criteria required for supercapacitor. Also MOFs can be cost effective and provides avenue for chemical tailorability with various synthetic approaches to develop a range of different structures. Therefore, recently MOFs have gained significant attention as supercapacitors nationally as well as internationally. So as to mention researchers developed conductive MOFs with ligand such as imidazole, adenine, etc. and were able to achieve very impressive capacitive behaviour. Also, developed composite materials of MOFs with conducting polymers and demonstrated significant improvement in the electrochemical performance of the resulting materials. Although, significant advancements have been made globally in development of MOFs based supercapacitors, however, there are numerous challenges and opportunities in the same. Hence, this project intended to synthesis conductive-MOFs and their composites with carbon materials such as graphene oxide (GO) or reduced graphene oxide (rGO), poly-aniline (PANI), poly-thiophene (PT), etc. for energy storage applications. In the project, we intended to synthesis cost-effective MOFs from readily available reagents under solvothermal conditions. Again, to improve the conductivity, composite will be fabricated by in situ growth of the MOFs on materials such as GO, rGO, PANI, etc. The supercapacitor performance of the developed materials to be investigated individually through Electrochemical Testing experiments.