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ENERGY STORAGE

Confined water controls capacitance

Nature Materials volume 20, pages 1597–1598 (2021)Cite this article

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By using a battery of experimental and theoretical methods, it is shown that ion intercalation into the electrode material birnessite is mediated by structural water.

Materials containing molecular layers of water in their structure are common and widely used in modern technology. Conventional clays, among the oldest materials used by humans, are a typical example. Just like common clays, metal oxides (RuO2, MnO2, V2O5, WO3, and so on) with layered morphology may contain structural water confined between two-dimensional (2D) solid lamellas, when produced by wet chemical methods. Complete water removal usually leads to structural transformation of those materials. The confined water film may also contain ions (typically alkali metals) that stabilize the structure and compensate for the surface charge of the ionic structural units of transition metal oxides (or nitrides and carbides, in the case of MXenes). These materials find applications in water purification and energy storage as they can selectively intercalate ions into the structure. Birnessite, known as δ-MnO2, is a common representative of such hydrated layered ceramics with water confined between MnO2 layers, and has been explored for energy storage applications1,2. The resulting material contains both cations and interlayer water, and is better represented as AxMnO2·nH2O, where A is a cation present during the synthesis, such as K+. However, how electrolyte ions are stored in the material has not been fully understood.

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Fig. 1: How electrochemical processes are affected by ion intercalation.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Université Paul Sabatier, CIRIMAT UMR CNRS 5085, Toulouse, France

    Patrice Simon & Yury Gogotsi

  2. Réseau sur le Stockage Electrochimique de l’Energie (RS2E), FR CNRS 3459, Amiens, France

    Patrice Simon

  3. Department of Materials Science & Engineering, and A.J. Drexel Nanomaterials Institute, Drexel University, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Yury Gogotsi

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  1. Patrice Simon
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  2. Yury Gogotsi
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Correspondence to Patrice Simon or Yury Gogotsi.

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Simon, P., Gogotsi, Y. Confined water controls capacitance. Nat. Mater. 20, 1597–1598 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41563-021-01155-4

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