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Physics Chat

Improvement in Energy Conversion and Energy Storage Applications by Liquid Crystals and Carbon Nanoparticles

Speaker: Benxuan Li (BHou)
Date: Friday 23 April 2021
Time: 15:00
Venue: Zoom

Currently, fossil fuels make up a significant proportion of global energy demand and cause many concerns, such as increasing greenhouse gas emission. Therefore, there is a considerable need for cost-effective, facile and efficient processing of environmentally-friendly energy harvesting and storage systems. Organic solar cells (OSCs) have emerged as promising third-generation photovoltaic devices owing to their outstanding properties such as potential low-cost mass manufacture, lightweight, mechanical flexibility and easy processability. For solar cell technologies, a smectic liquid crystal C8-BTBT was selected due to its unique thermal dynamic and crystal properties. A range of ternary OSCs were investigated with and without C8-BTBT loading at gradient weight fractions were thermally treated and fabricated. It is shown that cells with 5 wt% C8-BTBT loading exhibited the best performance after thermal annealing at 120 oC. Based on this, flexible OSCs were fabricated using hydrogel substrates which can be dissolved in different types of polar solvents, becoming promising for sustainable and recyclable solar cells. For the development of energy storage devices, asymmetric carbon nanohorns were proposed as an active material to fabricate flexible solid-state carbon wire-based electrochemical supercapacitors (ss-CWECs) which exhibited high power density and ultra-low cutoff frequency. By using activated carbon, multi-walled carbon nanotubes, and single-wall carbon nanohorns as hybrid electrode materials, remarkable specific length capacitance of 48.76 mF cm-1 and charge-discharge stability of ss-CWECs were demonstrated. Furthermore, a high-pass filter for eliminating ultra-low electronic noise was demonstrated, which enables an optical Morse Code communication system. These results provide a step forwards in the development of energy conversion and storage devices for the more efficient energy system.

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