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Page 37
Recycling 2019 & Material Science 2019
July 22-23, 2019
Volume 3
Journal of Environmental Geology
Material Science and Nanotechnology
Global Recycling Summit
July 22-23, 2019 | Rome, Italy
6
th
International Conference on
&
Reduced graphene oxide for energy harvesting and storage
Olena Okhay
1
, António M de Bastos Pereira
1
, Alexandre Cunha Bastos
1
, Alexander Tkach
1
and
Joao Ventura
2
,
1
University of Aveiro, Portugal
2
University of Porto, Portugal
T
he need for clean and sustainable energy sources to meet the exponentially rising energy demands of the world has compelled
scientists to look for new power generation strategies. Photovoltaic and thermoelectric (TE) energy conversion is proved as
an alternative route to obtain electric power economically and to harvest widely distributed waste heat, respectively [1,2]. At the
same time the renewal of interest to fundamental mechanisms of energy storage in electrochemical supercapacitors (SCs) was
boosted by the progress in development of novel materials (mainly carbon based) for nanostructured electrodes [3]. SCs can be
charged faster than batteries, leading to a very high power density, and do not lose their storage capabilities over the time. The
main shortcoming of SCs is their low energy density, meaning that the amount of energy, which SCs can store, per unit weight is
very small, particularly when compared to batteries. There is a wide range of the materials for electrodes and electrolytes but all
of them have limitations. Preliminary design criteria and cell specifications are following: flexible, low weight and cheap. Thus,
obtaining the freestanding electrodes by simple vacuum filtration will decrease the total weight of full cell device and total cost.
At the same time, reduced graphene oxide (rGO) has attracted significant attention in recent years due to its extraordinary
physical and chemical properties [3]. Thanks to the combination of the excellent mechanical properties and compositional
tunability, rGO-based materials are exciting systems for their potential applications [4,5]. Within this context, use of rGO in solar
cells, TE generators and electrodes for SCs is very perspective and needs to be further investigated. In the current work structural
and microstructure properties, as well as electrical, TE and electrochemical characteristics of rGO-based films and papers are
presented and their relation is studied.
Figure 1: Scanning electron microscopy image (left) and electrochemical characterization (right) of rGO-based paper
with Ni nanparticles (rGO+NiNPs), polycarbonate (rGO+poly) and potassium chloride (rGO+KCl) additives
JEnvironGeol. |Volume3
ISSN:2591-7641