Surface area and pore size analyzer for nanoporous materials development in electrochemical energy research

化石燃料资源的日益减少，同时能源需求的增加，以及人们对当前能源使用对环境的负面影响的认识不断增强，造成了发展电化学能量转换和储存系统的压力不断加大。太阳能电池和燃料电池可以通过高效、清洁地将阳光/燃料转化为电能来满足这一需求，而电池和超级电容器设备可以为交通应用储存能量。然而，这些新技术仍然需要进一步开发，因为它们的储能能力仍然太小，成本太高，而且就燃料电池而言，它们的耐用性仍然需要提高。为了解决直接影响这些技术商业化的材料问题，将开发纳米多孔材料，并将其用于燃料电池技术、电池、超级电容器和太阳能电池系统。催化剂的催化活性和选择性以及纳米多孔材料的容量和动力学取决于纳米多孔材料的比表面积、孔体积和孔径分布。因此，在开发和测试新型纳米材料时，具有这些微结构特性是很重要的。表面分析仪使用气体的物理吸附来确定材料的比表面积、孔体积和孔尺寸分布。该仪器的多功能性允许表征各种纳米多孔材料，如活性碳、碳纳米管、石墨烯、沸石和聚合物，因此该仪器将是我们的电化学能源系统小组以及滑铁卢大学许多工程和科学学科的研究人员非常有用的工具。

Diminishing fossil fuel resources, simultaneously increasing energy demands, and the rising awareness of the negative environmental impact of the current energy use, create an escalating pressure to develop electrochemical energy conversion and storage system. Solar cells and fuel cells can meet this demand by efficiently and cleanly converting sunlight/fuels to electricity, while batteries and supercapacitor devices can store energy for transportation applications. These new technologies, however, still require further development because their capacity to store energy is still too small, their cost too high, and in the case of fuel cells, their durability still requires improvement. In order to deal with materials issues that directly impact on commercialization of these technologies, nanoporous materials will be developed and used in fuel cell technology, battery, supercapacitor and solar cell system. The catalytic activity and selectivity of catalysts and the capacity and kinetics of nanoporous materials depend on the specific surface area, pore volume, and pore size distribution of the nanoporous materials. Hence it is important to have these microstructural properties when developing and testing novel nanomaterials. A Surface Analyzer uses physical adsorption of gases to determine specific surface area, pore volume, and pore size distribution of materials. The instrument's versatility allows for characterizing a wide variety of nanoporous materials such as, activated carbon, carbon nanotubes, graphenes, zeolites, and polymers, therefore the instrument will be an extremely useful tool for our electrochemical energy system group as well as to researchers in many engineering and science disciplines at the University of Waterloo.