Increasing energy demands, depletion of fossil fuels, and environmental issues have impelled society to choose the pathways of renewable and clean energy, which motivated scientists and engineers to develop sustainable, renewable, and clean energy resources. However, the major challenge is the implementation of low-cost, flexible approaches and materials to fulfill the requirements of energy storage and conversion technologies, specifically those involving batteries and supercapacitors. In this context, herein, we demonstrate an integrated approach to realize three-dimensional (3-D) mesoporous nickel(Ni)/nickel oxide (NiO) nanostructures with enhanced performance for supercapacitor applications. Conformal deposition of NiO nanoflakes on 3-D mesoporous Ni onto inexpensive Cu substrates with large active surface area, providing easy ion accessibility through mesoporous channels and improving electron transport through interconnected nickel network. The 3-D mesoporous Ni/NiO nanoflakes exhibit excellent electrochemical performance, namely, areal capacitance of 720 mFcm −2 , energy density of 4 μWhcm −2 and power density of 2.5 mWcm −2 and a reasonable capacity retention for 5000 cycles. We believe that these results may provide a roadmap to further tune the conditions so as to engineer oxide architectures to derive enhanced energy performance of supercapacitor devices for practical applications.
Limited fossil fuels, increasing population and pollution, environmental/climate change, and ever‐increasing demand for energy are motivating society to use renewable and clean energy for all needs in the domestic and industrial sectors. However, the intermittent nature of renewable sources hinders their continuous availability and utilization. Subsequently, energy storage devices, such as supercapacitors and batteries, are becoming popular for the sustainable development of future generations. But, the bottleneck is the associated high cost, which limits the bulk use of batteries and supercapacitors. In this context, and realizing that the cost of energy storage devices mainly depends on materials, synthesis processes/procedures and device fabrication, we made an effort to rationally design and develop novel low‐cost electrode materials with enhanced electrochemical performance in asymmetric supercapacitors. In this work, we adopted the surface functionalization approach to design low‐cost 3‐D mesoporous and nanostructured nickel (Ni) ‐ nickel oxide (NiO) electrode materials using facile synthesis for application in supercapacitors. We demonstrate that the 3‐D mesoporous Ni provides a high surface area and enhanced ionic conductivity, while germanium (Ge) functionalization improves the electrical conductivity and reduces the charge transfer resistance of NiO. Surface functionalization with Ge demonstrates a significant improvement in the specific capacitance of NiO. The asymmetric supercapacitor using these Ge‐functionalized NiO‐Ni electrodes provides a specific capacitance of 304 Fg‐1 (94 mFcm‐2), energy density of 23.8 Whkg‐1 (7.35 µWhcm‐2), and power density of 6.8 kWkg‐1 (2.1 mWcm‐2) with excellent cyclic stability of 92 % after 10000 cycles. Finally, powering the digital watch using the asymmetric supercapacitors in laboratory conditions is demonstrated to validate their practical applications.This article is protected by copyright. All rights reserved.
In this study, a simple one-step approach has been proposed to treat spent electroless nickel plating bath by precipitating nickel metal as nickel hydroxide. Beta phase nickel hydroxide β-Ni(OH)2 generated...
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