Nanostructured transition metal oxides for energy storage and conversion

Lithium-ion batteries, supercapacitors and photovoltaic devices have been widely considered as the three major promising alternatives of fossil fuels facing upcoming depletion to power the 21th century. The conventional film configuration of electrochemical electrodes hardly fulfills the high energy and efficiency requirements because heavy electroactive material deposition restricts ion diffusion path, and lowers power density and fault tolerance. In this thesis, I demonstrate that novel nanoarchitectured transition metal oxides (TMOs), e.g. MnO2, V2O 5, and ZnO, and their relevant nanocomposites were designed, fabricated and assembled into devices to deliver superior electrochemical performances such as high energy and power densities, and rate capacity. These improvements could be attributed to the significant enhancement of surface area, shortened ion diffusion distances and facile penetration of electrolyte solution into open structures of networks as well as to the pseudocapacitance domination. The utilization of ForcespinningRTM, a newly developed nanofiber processing technology, for large-scale energy storage and conversion applications is emphasized. This process simplifies the tedious multi-step hybridization synthesis and facilitates the contradiction between the micro-batch production and the ease of large-scale manufacturing.;Key Words: Transition metal oxides, energy storage and conversion, ForcespinningRTM, pseudocapacitance domination, high rate capacity.