Chemically Integrated Hybrid 2-D Materials for Flexible Energy Storage Devices

Two-dimensional (2-D) materials have been a promising material platform for making powerful energy devices including highly flexible energy storage devices. Owing to their advantageous features of flexibility, large surface area and open ion transport pathway within 2D layers, highly electroactive 2-D transition-metal oxide and phosphate nanosheets materials show promise in flexible supercapacitors with high power and energy densities. Here I will present our recent progress on chemically integrated hybrid 2-D materials to build ultraflexible, high-performance energy storage devices. One example is the building of integrated hybrid vanadyl phosphate VOPO₄/graphene ultrathin-film solid-state pseudocapacitors (1). The other is the development of MnO₂/graphene hybrid nanostructures based flexible planar supercapacitors (2).

Rational material and structural design demonstrated in these studies show hybrid structures not only take advantage of excellent electronic conductivity of graphene nanosheets but also introduce more electrochemically active surfaces for absorption/desorption of electrolyte ions, which can greatly facilitate charge transport during electrochemical processes.

References

(1) Wu, C.; Lu, X.; Peng, L.; Xu, K.; Peng, X.; Huang, J.; Yu, G.; Xie, Y. Nature Communications  2013, 4, 2431.

(2) Peng, L.; Peng, X.; Liu, B.; Wu, C.; Xie, Y.; Yu, G. Nano Letters 2013, 13, 2151.