Artificial cardiac pacemaker as an electronic device, can deliver the electrical impulses to regulate the heartbeats during emergency. In order to prevent the unnecessary injury caused by battery-replacement surgery, there is an urgent need to have a better energy storage device that could store enough energy with an excellent lifetime for 20 years. Supercapattery is a hybrid energy storage device, which combines the best of both battery and supercapacitor worlds and should be able to store enough energy like a battery with cyclability and specific power similar to a supercapacitor. Thereby, we are fabricating novel nanomaterials based electrodes for the development of these hybrid energy storage devices.^1-2

In this work, a heterostructure of silver oxide - cobalt phosphate nanoparticle/ nanoflake was synthesized on nickel foam (NF) via simple hydrothermal method. The electrode was analyzed by X-ray diffraction (XRD), Raman spectroscopy, scanning electron microscope (SEM), energy dispersive X-ray spectroscopy (EDX) and transmission electron microscope (TEM) to study the composition, structure and morphology of the heterostructure. The silver oxide nanoparticle enhanced the surface area of the electrode and improved electrochemical performance. The heterostructured electrode showed a wide potential window of 0.75 V in 3.0 M KOH solution and delivered a maximum specific capacity of 282.4 mAh g^-1, which is equivalent to 1355.3 F g^-1with no decay after 1,000 charge-discharge cycles. The performance of this heterostructure will be reported as a positive electrode in a complete supercapattery device configuration.

Acknowledgment

The authors acknowledge financial support from EU FP7 project MANpower (Contract 604360) to carry out this work.

Corresponding author's email address: kafil.mahmood@tyndall.ie

Reference

[1] Shao H.; Padmanathan, N.; McNulty, D.; O'Dwyer, C.; Razeeb, K. M., Supercapattery based on binder-free Co₃(PO₄)₂·8H₂O multilayer nano/ microflakes on nickel foam. ACS applied materials & interfaces 2016, 8, pp. 28592-28598.

[2] Padmanathan, N.; Shao, H.; McNulty, D.; O'Dwyer, C.; Razeeb, K. M., Hierarchical NiO–In₂O₃ microflower (3D)/ nanorod (1D) hetero-architecture as a supercapattery electrode with excellent cyclic stability. J. Mater. Chem. A 2016, 4(13), pp. 4820-4830.

Figure 1. SEM image of silver oxide-cobalt phosphate electrode.