Abstract
A single nanopore structure that embeds all components of an electrochemical storage device could bring about the ultimate miniaturization in energy storage. Self-alignment of electrodes within each nanopore may enable closer and more controlled spacing between electrodes than in state-of-art batteries. Such an ‘all-in-one’ nanopore battery array would also present an alternative to interdigitated electrode structures that employ complex three-dimensional geometries with greater spatial heterogeneity. Here, we report a battery composed of an array of nanobatteries connected in parallel, each composed of an anode, a cathode and a liquid electrolyte confined within the nanopores of anodic aluminium oxide, as an all-in-one nanosize device. Each nanoelectrode includes an outer Ru nanotube current collector and an inner nanotube of V2O5 storage material, forming a symmetric full nanopore storage cell with anode and cathode separated by an electrolyte region. The V2O5 is prelithiated at one end to serve as the anode, with pristine V2O5 at the other end serving as the cathode, forming a battery that is asymmetrically cycled between 0.2 V and 1.8 V. The capacity retention of this full cell (relative to 1 C values) is 95% at 5 C and 46% at 150 C, with a 1,000-cycle life. From a fundamental point of view, our all-in-one nanopore battery array unveils an electrochemical regime in which ion insertion and surface charge mechanisms for energy storage become indistinguishable, and offers a testbed for studying ion transport limits in dense nanostructured electrode arrays.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by Nanostructures for Electrical Energy Storage (NEES), an Energy Frontier Research Center funded by the US Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Basic Energy Sciences (award no. DESC0001160). The authors acknowledge support from the Maryland NanoCenter and the NispLab, and thank C. Wang for providing electrolyte, M. Noked, Y. Xu and C. Sun for discussions regarding electrochemistry and J. Provine for valuable suggestions for noble-metal ALD.
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C.L., X.C., S.B.L. and G.W.R. conceived and designed the experiments. C.L. and X.C. performed the half-cell experiments. C.L. performed the full-cell experiment. E.I.G. conducted the COMSOL simulation. A.J.P. carried out XPS characterization. K.E.G., A.C.K. and M.A.S. contributed material fabrication tools. C.L., E.I.G., S.B.L. and G.W.R. co-wrote the paper. All authors discussed the results and commented on the manuscript.
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Liu, C., Gillette, E., Chen, X. et al. An all-in-one nanopore battery array. Nature Nanotech 9, 1031–1039 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1038/nnano.2014.247
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/nnano.2014.247
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