Collaborative Research: Photon-Enabled Atomic Drilling of Graphene for Supercapacitors

超级电容器已成为下一代高性能电源，广泛用于消费、生物医学、医疗保健和军事应用的便携式设备。同时实现高能量和功率密度、长循环寿命是超级电容器设计的一个基本挑战。多孔石墨烯框架，由三维石墨烯结构组成，包含纳米级孔和微孔，由于其优越的电化学性能，已经成为解决这一挑战的有希望的解决方案。然而，现有的制备这种石墨烯骨架的方法往往依赖于热化学蚀刻工艺，由于实验复杂和蚀刻剂热稳定性差，效率低，可控性差。该奖项支持基础研究，为开发利用光子材料相互作用的新型制造策略提供知识，以实现高效的多孔石墨烯框架制造。由于超级电容器潜在的变革性性能改进，这项研究将具有显著的更广泛的影响，因为它会溢出到几乎所有的经济部门。该项目还为研究生、本科生和K-12学生提供了一个综合的科学和工程培训平台，特别强调促进妇女和代表性不足的学生参与研究。该项目的目标是建立一种新的光子驱动原子钻孔工艺，以制造用于超级电容器应用的多孔石墨烯框架。该方法利用纳秒脉冲激光的光子在石墨烯基面上启动纳米孔的原子钻孔，以高效率和可控性制备多孔石墨烯框架。主要研究目标是建立对多孔石墨烯框架形成的光子激活原子钻孔过程机制的基本理解。一个计算模型能够预测光子激活键的激发和解离作为激光加工参数的影响将被开发。将进行微结构表征和电化学性能测试，以建立工艺-结构-性能关系。该研究为光子制造技术的发展做出了贡献。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Supercapacitors have emerged as next-generation high-performance power sources for portable devices used in a wide range of consumer, biomedical, healthcare, and military applications. It remains a fundamental challenge in supercapacitor design to simultaneously achieve high energy and power densities with a long cycle life. A porous graphene framework, consisting of a three-dimensional graphene structure containing nano-sized holes and micro-size pores, has emerged as a promising solution to address this challenge due to its superior electrochemical properties. However, the existing methods for fabricating this graphene framework often rely on thermal chemical etching processes, which suffer from low efficiency and poor controllability due to complex experiments and poor thermal stability of etchants. This award supports fundamental research to provide knowledge for the development of a novel manufacturing strategy using photon-material interactions to realize porous graphene framework fabrication with a high efficiency. This research will have significant broader impact because of the spillover into literally all economic sectors because of the potential transformative performance improvement of supercapacitors. This project also provides an integrated science and engineering training platform for graduate, undergraduate, and K-12 students, with particular emphasis on promoting participation of women and underrepresented students in research.The goal of this project is to establish a novel photon-enabled atomic drilling process to fabricate porous graphene frameworks toward supercapacitor applications. The photon-enabled atomic drilling approach utilizes photons from a nanosecond pulsed laser to initiate atomic drilling of nanoholes in the graphene basal planes for porous graphene framework fabrication with high efficiency and controllability. The major research objective is to establish a fundamental understanding of mechanisms involved in the photon-enabled atomic drilling process responsible for the formation of porous graphene frameworks. A computational model capable of predicting photon-enabled bond excitation and dissociation as affected by the laser processing parameters will be developed. Microstructure characterization and electrochemical property testing will be conducted to establish the process-structure-property relationship. This research contributes to advances in photon-based manufacturing technology development.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.