Raman Spectroscopy for Nanomaterials Development in Electrochemical Energy Research

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The development of cost-competitive, highly efficient, and environmentally benign energy conversion and storage technologies is a major global challenge. 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 and batteris, their durability still requires improvement. In order to deal with materials issues that directly impact on commercialization of these technologies, novel nanomaterials will be developed and used in fuel cell, battery, supercapacitor and solar cell systems. The durability, performance and capacity of these electrochemical energy systems depend on the nanomaterials. Hence it is important to understand the degradation mechanism and track the kinetic phenomena of nanomaterials when developing and testing novel catalysts and composite membranes in electrochemical energy systems. A Raman Spectroscopy allows for characterizing the degradation mechanism and the kinetic phenomena of a wide variety of nanomaterials such as Nanocatalysts, Nanocompoiste membranes, Thin films, Nanoengineered electrodes, therefore the instrument will be an extremely useful tool for our electrochemical energy system team as well as to researchers in many engineering and science disciplines at the University of Waterloo.