Research Projects

Developing a simple, renewable and cost-effective technology to enhance the low-temperature performance of supercapacitor is of urgent importance. As we know, the solar energy is abundant renewable energy resource that reaches the earth’s surface with a quantity of energy far exceeding human needs and is arousing worldwide attention. Solar energy can be utilised to heat the devices via appropriate material-mediated photothermal conversion. For this purpose, light-to-heat converting materials, also called as photothermal materials, are drawing increasing attention of researchers. However, most of the existing GO and rGO based photothermal supercapacitor fabrication protocols are complex and thereby not suitable for scale-up. Here we propose to fabricate near-infrared (NIR) sensitive nanoparticle (Fe2O3, Al2O3, Mo-Fe2O3, W-Fe2O3, Mo-Al2O3, W-Al2O3 and CaCO3) incorporated GO or rGO composite films (bi-functional electrodes) using a simple spray technique which is cost-effective and an easy-to-scale up process. This project is critical for developing self-reliance low-temperature energy storage technology which has applications in defense, space exploration and electric vehicles (EV) with direct societal impact.