Raman Spectroscopy for Nanomaterials Development in Electrochemical Energy Research

开发具有成本竞争力、高效和环境友好的能源转换和储存技术是一项重大的全球挑战。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，而且就燃料电池和电池而言，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，将开发新型纳米材料，并将其用于燃料电池、电池、超级电容器和太阳能电池系统。这些电化学能量系统的耐用性、性能和容量取决于纳米材料。因此，在开发和测试电化学能量系统中的新型催化剂和复合膜时，了解纳米材料的降解机理并跟踪其动力学现象是非常重要的。拉曼光谱可以表征各种纳米材料的降解机制和动力学现象，如纳米催化剂、纳米复合膜、薄膜、纳米工程电极，因此该仪器将是我们的电化学能源系统团队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。

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.