
Energy storage devices serve as one of the essential parts for human civilization. To date, there are sufficient researches for such devices, typically, ion batteries, supercapacitors and fuel cells. Within them, the selection of electrode is becoming the most important fields. Herein, in our work, we mainly focus on the fabrication and application of electrode materials via the combination of plasma techniques and wet-chemical approaches:
- Ion batteries: we mainly concentrate on the anode materials, such as metal sulfides, nitrides and oxides. Plasma-based strategies was applied for the synthesis of nanostructured materials as well as the optimization of material surfaces for the enhancement of charge transfer. The anode materials of lithium ion batteries and sodium ion batteries have been investigated according to our work;
- Supercapacitors: the plasma-based approaches were also used for the fabrication and optimization of electrode material structurization. Specifically, carbon-based plasmas have been applied for the fabrication of vertical graphene. The anchored MnO2 on such three-dimensional nanostructures provided enhanced supercapacitive performance because of the enhanced charge transfer properties;
- Fuel cells: In our work, we mainly focus on the hydrogen evolution reaction, oxygen evolution reaction, and oxygen reduction reaction. During these researches, nitrogen-based plasmas have been introduced for the fabrication of transition metal nitride nano-structures for enhanced electrocatalytic behaviors. For instance, we have applied nitrogen plasma for achieving the highly-purified metal nitride nano-coral. Such strategies cannot only be applied for metallic nickel, but also for dual-metallic alloys.