Electrochemical study of hybrid nanocomposites

All over the world, several researchers have made a huge effort to synthesize new cathode materials for íon-lithium batteries. The driving force for this effort is the fast increase of the production of electronic applications, which need a portable and small power energy device. This devices need electrode materials with high specific charge capacity, high conductivity and good chemical stability. Inorganic materials as vanadium pentoxide and organic electronic conducting polymers as polyaniline are materials widely studied. Vanadium pentoxide has a high charging voltage and theoretical charge capacity but the slow lithium intercalation kinetics is a problem for high-energy batteries. So that, the synthesis of nanocomposite hybrid materials is one of the possible solutions to overcome this problem. Nanocomposite of polyaniline or sulfonated polyaniline/vanadium pentoxide present very good electrochemical properties in this sense, due to the intimate mixture at nanoscale between the components. In our lab, several techniques can be used to the electrochemical study of these materials together with the structural characterization using equipments of other labs, with a strong scientific collaboration stablished. Results obtained for a polyaniline/vanadium pentoxide nanocomposite by using electrochemical quartz microbalance simultaneously with cyclic voltammetry are shown in the figure.