CEMES – Thursday seminars – Electrochemistry at the nanoscale: racking ion fluxes in materials for energy storage applications

Electrochemical energy storage (batteries, supercapacitors), driven mainly by the development of electric mobility, has now become a major social and economic issue (reducing dependence on fossil fuels and combating CO2 emissions). The reactions in the electrodes of electrochemical energy storage systems involve ionic and electronic transfers at the solid/electrolyte interface in porous electrodes. The performance of these electrodes depends on the transport and transfer kinetics of the species in the so-called electrochemically active materials. In this presentation, we will show how it is possible to measure ionic and electronic fluxes in these electrodes using advanced electrochemical techniques. We will see that confining the electrolyte in nanometric and sub-nanometric channels leads to changes in their solvation, resulting in remarkable properties for electrochemical energy storage.