Surface modification - effect in battery application

Abstract

Growing advent of technology and rising environmental concerns together have brought us on brink of strictly restricting ourselves against usage of coal and other non renewable resources. ‘Paris agreement’ 2015 is a global step towards achieving a sustainable energy resource and reduce green house emissions. This is the reason of motivation of many researchers that bought them together to find a sustainable, accessible and affordable electric storage device. This project is an attempt to dig deep into the properties of one of very strong contender of this race. Aluminum due to its high abundance and high power density can prove to be worthy of extensive use as an anode material. In the project, properties and behavior of Aluminium ion battery (AIB) with Tin oxide (SnO2) as cathode (active electrode material) is analyzed by using two different electrochemical techniques, Galvanostatic charge discharge measurement and Cyclic voltammetry. In order to further improve the performance of the battery, thin-film coating of Zinc oxide (ZnO) was employed on the active electrode material via Atomic layer deposition (ALD) technique. Significant changes are observed in performance parameters like: Energy density, Power density, reversibility and specific capacity etc. Optimum thickness of ZnO film coating act as an effective layer on the active electrode material, which may help to achieve better solid electrolyte inter-phase (SEI), thus providing better electrochemical performance in the system.. Hence improvement in both qualitative as well as quantitative aspect in the battery performance were observed in this study. The studies in this thesis work will lead towards exploring the effective active electrode materials through surface-interface modification towards its application in novel Al-ion battery technology. It should be noted that the complete experimental part of this project work was carried out by the Ph.D. students of my supervisor’s (Dr. Sudeshna Chattopadhyay) research group prior to the Covid 19 situation, and in this thesis work I have focused on the analysis and data interpretation of this project and included it accordingly in my thesis.