About the PoreCharge project

• Background

  Supercapacitors are energy storage devices that can deliver higher power than batteries and degrade more slowly. Now that the world urgently needs to move from fossil to renewable energy sources, supercapacitors can become important components in this transition. They are already used, for example, in electric vehicles and to stabilize the power grid. However, an important limitation of supercapacitors is that the amount of energy that can be stored per volume or weight is low. Attempts to increase the supercapacitors' energy storage have often undermined their power output. To deal with this "energy-power dilemma", the project will develop a multi-scale modeling framework for charging supercapacitor electrodes.

  The electrodes of supercapacitors contain pores of different sizes and shapes filled with ions. The narrower the pores, the more energy a supercapacitor can store. However, molecular simulations have shown that ions can get trapped when the pores are too narrow, leading to clogged pores. This should be avoided since clogged pores do not contribute to the power output of supercapacitors. The project will therefore build a model that will reproduce pore-clogging to learn how to prevent it. The modeling framework's accuracy will also be tested in experiments on home-built supercapacitors.

• Objectives

  The primary objective of the PoreCharge project is to boost supercapacitor energy storage without jeopardizing their fast dynamics.

  Secondary objectives are:

  • 1: To replicate pore-clogging in nanopores in computationally cheap continuum models.
  • 2: To optimize the charging and discharging of such nanopore models.
  • 3: To determine how a model of a complete electrode – containing both clogging nanopores and free macropores – can be charged fastest.
  • 4: To verify our modeling predictions in experiments.

Participants

• Participating researchers at NMBU
• External participants

  Amrita Jain

  IPPT PAN

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