| The ability to produce clean water and produce and store clean energy is essential to society. Hence, technologies that facilitate clean energy and clean water are of great importance. This study focused on utilizing nanoporous insulating oxide materials to alter the chemistry at the electrode/electrolyte interface to improve the performance of a number of clean energy and clean water technologies.;Here we have shown that applying a thin-film of SiO2 nanoparticles to an electrochemical capacitor electrode can increase the energy storage capacity by up to 50% at high power ratings. We have developed a geometric model to describe the coating of the porous electrode to explain the increased performance at high power ratings. We have also shown that the coated electrochemical capacitor exhibits a higher capacitance when normalized to BET surface area, suggesting that the coated surface is behaving fundamentally differently than the uncoated surface. We attribute the increase in capacitance to the inherent surface potential of the oxide coating and have shown that if we alter the surface potential of the oxide, we can in turn alter the electrochemical capacitance.;In addition, we have determined that when used in capacitive deionization systems, these coatings can increase ion removal and accelerate regeneration, allowing for higher efficiency and less waste water. We have demonstrated that a nanoporous oxide coating can increase the gas production rate and lower the overpotential of the hydrogen evolution reaction via water electrolysis on both stainless steel and carbon electrodes. In addition, this work presents data on utilizing nanoporous oxide coatings on Li-Ion battery cathodes to improve high temperature capacity fade. We also introduce a novel thin-film battery/electrochemical capacitor hybrid device, which can improve the performance of simple thin-film batteries. |
