SANS Study of the Increased Accessibility of Electrolytes into Aqueous Based Supercapacitor Electrodes Using Novel Heteroatom-Loaded Activat

Aqueous electrolyte devices are of interest since they are environmentally benign and also they can be manufactured at much lower overall cost. However, to compensate for reduced energy density we need to develop carbon electrolyte materials with a very precisely controlled porosity and with pseudo-capacitive properties. In a recently finished set of experiments using CM-SANS (October 2019) we have obtained very promising results on the improved accessibility of D2O into the internal pores of carbons loaded with oxygen functionalities. We also conducted some initial experiments on N-loaded carbons with highly promising and exciting results. To confirm and quantify our N-doping promising results and also to investigate further increasing carbon/water interactions by introduction of Sulphur hetero-atoms to the carbon surface we are proposing additional SANS on N and S-loaded carbons.