The rapid depletion of unsustainable fossil fuels and growing environmental issues have posed serious scientific challenges and triggered research interests on renewable energy technologies development to address the increasing global demand for energy. Electrochemical energy storage and conversion technologies (ESCTs), including lithium-ion batteries, metal-air batteries, supercapacitors, and fuel cells, etc., provide a strategy to use energy in a clean and sustainable manner. As the core components, the electrode materials, e.g., anodes, cathodes, and catalysts, play a direct decisive role in the device's performance in practical application. Therefore, acquiring high-performance and low-cost electrode materials is critical for carrying out these sustainable energy technologies. Inorganic nanostructured films (NFs) are the essential component for renewable energy storage technology owing to their unique merits: (i) high surface area and interconnected channels facilitate mass/ ion transport; (ii) additive-free features enable easy
fabrication; (iii) exposed active sites and abundant catalyst-electrolyte interface. Electrochemical method (deposition and anodization) is a comparably green and facile process used for fabricating self-organized NFs.
Herein, in this dissertation research, a series of nanostructured alloy thin films (TFs) manufacturing based on controllable electrochemical method, and their application in renewable ESCTs (zinc-air batteries and lithium-ion batteries) were developed. For the zinc-air batteries, a dynamic gas-bubbles templates directed electrochemical process was proposed and designed to fabricate a series of porous platinum (Pt)-based alloy films, achieving the controllable porous structure and active catalytic sites exposure, which thus serve as high-performance zin-air batteries (ZABs) electrodes with high energy density and superior cycling stability. For the lithium-ion batteries (LIBs), a copper-tin (Cu-Sn) intermetallic coating layer is rationally designed through simple electrodeposition method to stabilize Sn LIBs anode through a structural reconstruction mechanism, which provides regulatable distribution of Cu buffer agents to alleviate volume
change and thus shows a significant improvement in cycling stability with a dramatically reduced capacity decay rate of 0.03% per cycle for 1000 cycles. These additive-free, scalable, easily controllable, and room temperature electrochemical processes for NFs production and engineering strategies are successfully designed and applied in the field of ESCTs, providing feasible and low-cost way to develop advanced electrodes for high-performance energy storage
and conversion devices.
Major: Materials Science and Engineering
Educational Career:
Bachelor's of Materials Engineering, BE, 2013, Shandong University
Master's of Materials Science, MS, 2016, Shandong University
Committee in Charge:
Yang Yang, Chair, Materials Science and Engineering
Jiyu Fang , Department of Materials Science and Engineering
Yajie Dong , Department of Materials Science and Engineering
Akihiro Kushima , Department of Materials Science and Engineering
Nina Orlovskaya, Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering
Approved for distribution by Yang Yang, Committee Chair, on March 15, 2023.
The public is welcome to attend.