Carbon Materials for Energy Storage Systems

Carbon materials are widely used for electrochemical applications because of their unique properties such as chemical inertness, low cost, high polarizability, conducting properties, versatile existing forms, e.g., powders, fibers, felts, composites, mats, monoliths, and foils. They can serve as active material, support of catalyst or percolator. Especially conducting properties determined by hybridization play a crucial role for all applications when charge transfer processes take place in the electrode/electrolyte interface. Carbon materials are utilized in the most popular power sources such as Li-ion batteries, some fuel cells and supercapacitors. However, each electrochemical application requires dissimilar properties of carbon. For instance anode materials for Li-ion cells desire carbons with a very low specific surface area, such as graphites, mesocarbon microbeads, cokes coated by pyrolitic carbon film. Particularly mesopores are detrimental being a source of high irreversible capacity of Li-ion anode during cycling. On the other hand, in fuel cells carbon materials can serve as a perfect mesoporous support for highly dispersed catalyst nanoparticles. In this case a high conductivity as well as developed mesoporosity is necessary because such pores allow an easy transport of reagents (e.g. methanol etc.) to interface and after reaction they permit diffusion of final products to the bulk of electrolyte. For special application as a support as well as an inert bare electrode a glassy carbon is often used indispensably. Among practical applications of carbon materials for energy storage a great attention is devoted to electrochemical capacitors where they are the main component of electrodes.

Elzbieta Frackowiak is a full professor at Poznan University of Technology (Institute of Chemistry and Technical Electrochemistry) in Poland. Her research field is energy storage/conversion with special emphasis on electrochemical capacitors, lithium-ion batteries, fuel cells, redox flow batteries and hydrogen electrosorption in carbon materials. She is particularly interested in electrode materials from nanoporous carbons, carbon nanotubes, carbons enriched with heteroatoms (nitrogen, oxygen), graphene materials, conducting polymers, transition metal dichalcogenides and their composites. She is also focused on the redox active species in electrolytes and electrode materials. From 2009 to 2014, she was a Chair of the Division 3 „Electrochemical Energy Conversion and Storage” of the International Society of Electrochemistry (ISE). She serves as Advisory Board Member in Energy & Environmental Science. She was a Carbon editor and now being an Honorary Member of Advisory Board. In 2011, she was awarded the Prize of the Foundation for Polish Science and Officer’s Cross of Polonia Restituta Order. She is also member of the Polish Academy of Sciences (vice-president 2015-2018), Fellow of Royal Society of Chemistry, ISE Fellow, Member of Academia Europaea. E. Frackowiak is author of ca. 200 peer-reviewed papers, 24 book chapters and 50 patents. She is also a co-editor of 2 books. The citation number of her papers exceeds 28 000, H=69. In the ranking of Stanford University, Elsevier, SciTech Strategies she belongs to the Top 2% world scientists.