ISCF Wave 1: 3D electrodes from 2D materials

该项目的重点是实现工业挑战基金的关键领域之一，即“汽车电气化电池的设计、开发和制造”。改进后的材料、电极和设备将在英国的两个关键中心进行设计、制造和验证，这两个中心是(1)曼彻斯特的国家石墨烯中心和(2)英国在WMG能源创新中心的非商业环境中建立的第一个全电池原型生产线。电化学储能的发展已经改变了我们对个人设备（移动电话、笔记本电脑）的使用，现在正准备在车辆运输中带来类似的转变。电化学能量存储（用于存储能量的电池，超级电容器，其中电力传输至关重要）也正在进入其他运输领域，如飞机，并日益成为“电网”规模上的电力存储的焦点。能源储存的改进依赖于一系列的技术发展，但最初的一个是新的电化学/电极材料的发展，它可以存储更多的能量和/或更高的功率提取。石墨烯（二维碳）的分离和对其特殊物理性质的理解引发了二维材料的出现，引发了人们对这类材料作为电极应用的巨大兴趣，其明确目标是改进现有的存储方法，并开发新的电化学存储方法。尽管石墨烯在电池和超级电容器方面的初步结果都很有希望，但随后的研究表明，石墨烯片重新聚集（变成石墨）的强烈热力学趋势意味着，在重复循环中，性能的最初改进通常不会保留下来。我们在这项工作中集中的方法是使用所谓的异质结构，一种以上二维材料的溶液混合物，作为我们的复合电极材料。第二点是，二维材料通常只能在非常小的范围内使用，因此在电化学存储技术中测试其性能经常是在太小的范围内进行的，无法代表现实的设备，特别是在运输应用方面。同样，我们将利用我们自己的（专利）方法来“剥离”二维材料，这是可扩展的，并通过在扩大电极准备时建立电极设计的孔隙度来解决这个挑战。最后，我们将在实际操作条件下测试组装的大型设备，并使用该测试结果来进一步优化材料制备和电极配方。该提案与工业战略挑战基金的目标非常一致，因为它：1 .得到了一系列英国企业的大力支持（从小型材料加工公司到最终用户，如捷豹路虎），从而增加了英国企业在研发方面的投资，提高了研发能力和能力；2：这项工作是化学家（曼彻斯特），化学工程师（WMG）和电气工程师（曼彻斯特）之间的合作，因此围绕ISCF的挑战领域提供了多学科和跨学科的研究；3：该项目将增加与挑战领域相关领域的商业-学术联系，特别是新电极材料的开发，研究降解和模拟电池性能的新方法是这项工作的重要组成部分。4：该项目将增加年轻，较小的公司（例如Archipelago）和更大，更成熟的价值链公司（例如Johnson Matthey， JLR）之间的合作；5 .项目的成功实施将增加海外对英国研发的投资，因为项目与海外拥有的产业有直接的联系。

This project focuses on delivering one of the key Industrial Challenge Fund Areas, which is 'the design, development and manufacture of batteries for the electrification of vehicles'. The improved materials, electrodes and devices will be designed, manufactured and validated in two key centres in the UK, which are (1) National Graphene Centre at Manchester and (2) the UK's first full battery prototyping lines in a non-commercial environment at the WMG Energy Innovation Centre. Developments in electrochemical energy storage have transformed our use of personal devices (mobile phones, laptops)and are now poised to bring about a similar transformation in vehicular transport. Electrochemical energy storage (batteriesfor storage of energy, supercapacitors where delivery of power is critical) is also making in-roads to other fields of transport,such as aircraft, and is increasingly a focus for storage of electricity on the "grid" scale. Improvements in energy storagedepend on a chain of technological developments, but the initial one is the development of new electrochemistry/electrodematerials, which allows more energy to be stored and/or higher power extraction.The advent of 2D materials, sparked by the isolation of graphene (2-dimensional carbon) and understanding of itsexceptional physical properties, has ignited enormous interest in the application of this family of materials as electrodes,with the express goals of improving existing storage approaches, and of developing new electrochemical storage methods.Although initial results with graphene, in both the battery and supercapacitor contexts, have been promising subsequentwork has shown that the strong thermodynamic tendency of graphene sheets to re-aggregate (to graphite) means thatinitial improvements in performance are generally not retained over repeated cycles. The approach that we concentrate on in this work is to use so-called heterostructures, solution phase mixturesof more than one 2D material, as our composite electrode material.A second point is that 2D materials are often only available on a very small scale, thus testing of theirperformance in electrochemical storage technologies is frequently performed on scales that are too small to berepresentative of realistic devices, particularly with regard to transport applications. Again, we will address this challenge byexploiting our own (patented) method to "exfoliate" 2D materials, which is scaleable, and by building in porosity to theelectrode design when scaling the electrode preparations up. Finally, we will test the assembled large scaledevices under realistic operational conditions and use the results of that testing to inform further optimisation of thematerial preparation and the electrode formulation. The proposal aligns strongly with the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund objectives in that it: 1: has strong support from a range of UK businesses (right across the value chain from small materials processing firms to end users such as JLR) and thereby increases UK businesses' investment in R&D and improved R&D capability and capacity; 2: the work is a collaboration between a Chemist (Manchester), Chemical Engineer (WMG) and Electrical Engineers (Manchester), and thus provides multi- and interdisciplinary research around the challenge areas of the ISCF; 3: the project will increase business-academic links in areas relating to the challenge areas, specifically as development of new electrode materials, novel methods to study degradation and to model cell performance are important components of this work 4: the project will increase collaboration between younger, smaller companies (eg Archipelago) and larger, more established companies up the value chain (eg Johnson Matthey, JLR); 5: Successful prosecution of the project will increase overseas investment in R&D in the UK, given the direct links to overseas-owned industries in the project.