image: Professor Hyun-Kon Song (top left) and Professor Tae-Hyuk Kwon (top right) and their research team at UNIST. view more
Credit: UNIST
A new era for energy recycling, which refers to the energy recovery process of utilizing indoor lights that would usually be wasted by converting them into electricity, will soon unfold. Thanks to the newly-developed electrode material, the charging efficiency was found to be significantly enhanced, even under dim light conditions.
A research team, jointly led by Professor Hyun-Kon Song and Professor Tae-Hyuk Kwon in the School of Energy and Chemical Engineering at UNIST has recently unveiled a novel battery system, which showed a high overall energy efficiency (ηoverall) of 13.2% under indoor lights. This is by far the highest overall efficiency of photorechargeable batteries (PRBs) ever reported under indoor lights, noted the research team.
The research team, in their previous work, introduced a PRB known as a dye-sensitized photorechargeable battery (DSPB), which exhibited a high energy conversion and storage efficiency of 11.5% under indoor lighting.
In this new study, researchers investigated the effect of the crystallite size of LMO on DSPB performance. The crystallite size of graphene-wrapped submicrometer-sized LMO (LMO@Gn) was tuned electrochemically from 26 to 34 nm via repeated LMO-to-L2MO transitions. The different crystallite orientations in LMO@Gn particles were ordered in an identical direction by an electric stimulus. The LMO@Gn having a 34 nm crystallite size (L34 and L34*) improved DSPB performances in dim light, compared with the smaller-crystallite LMO@Gn (L26).
Their findings demonstate that the overall energy efficiency (ηoverall) of 13.2% was achieved by adopting the fully crystallized and structure-stabilized LMO@Gn (L34*) for DSPB. The phase transition between the cubic and tetragonal forms during the LMO-to-L2MO reaction was suspected to be responsible for the structural ordering, noted the research team.
The findings of this research have been featured on the supplementary cover of ACS Energy Letters. This work has been supported by the National Research Foundation of Korea (NRF) and Korea Electric Power Corporation (KEPCO).
This study was made available online in March 2021 ahead of final publication in issue in April 2021.
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Journal
ACS Energy Letters