PhD Project by Premkumar Murugesan

Project title: Metal-Organic Frameworks-incorporated Micro-Architectured Supercapacitors
Group: Biomaterial Microsystems
Supervisor: Stephan Sylvest Keller
 
Project description
The growing need for high-performance energy storage devices, such as supercapacitors and batteries, requires the development of advanced electrode materials with intelligent architecture designs. The age-old requirements of superior electrochemical parameters, mechanical stability, and long-term durability for the commercial success of these electrode materials are still relevant and sought after. No matter how exceptional the energy storage properties of materials can be tuned, their co-dependency on utilizing current collectors in the form of foams and other substrates calls their final commercial utilization into question, even when their scalability issues have been resolved. Excluding the materials directly grown on those substrates, the rest of the conventionally drop-casted (Conventional slurry coating) ones require additional binders, conductive carbons, and slurry solvents during the electrode preparation stage. This issue raises the cost and complexity of the production and impairs electrical conductivity and its resultant effects on rate capability, stability, and, most importantly, the ineffective utilization of the desired mesoporous surface-active redox sites that drive electrochemical reactions. Ultimately, this results in the origin of two simultaneous problems that require immediate attention in the scientific world of high-performance electrode material fabrication. That is to say, the simultaneous optimization of the transport kinetics utilized in energy storage. 

1. Enhancing the electron transport pathways with hierarchical conductance electrode design: The electrochemically relevant architectural design of macro and microstructures of the base substrate for enhanced electrochemical performance (higher surface area for a given mass or volume and given relative density) and improved electrical conductivity of the proposed alternatives. (The alternative substrates should yield less mass per given dimension than the contemporary metal foams, Ex: metal particle infusion in/on micro strutted Pyrolytic carbon via 3D-µSLA printing vs other metallic foams of the same dimension), 

2. Shortening the ion transport kinetics through hierarchical porosity tuning on the above-optimized architecture: Designing a high-performance electro-active redox material that can be grown or coated on the above optimized microstructural architectures to form a self/ free-standing electrode. (This requires material possessing higher surface area with tunable, accessible, architectural porosity (Macro-meso-micro-sub-micro pore levels), with larger redox active sites (in this case; metal/ metal oxide nodes), architectural rigidity (Framework structures) and carbon yielding/ embedding structures upon pyrolysis.) 

In broader terms, what if we could eliminate the need for traditional current collectors in electrochemical analysis to avoid backdrop contribution and biased performance enhancement? What if we could pre-design a 3D lightweight multi-functional material architecture with free-standing and micro-super capacitive energy-storing devices with scale-up potentials?!.
The project is funded by the “Eurotech Alliance Project: MOF-Mass”, in close collaboration with Prof. Roland A. Fischer and Mian Zahid Hussain (Chair of Inorganic and Metal-Organic Chemistry and the Director of the TUM Catalysis Research Center (CRC)) at the Technical University of Munich (TUM).