Advanced Gels for Aqueous Energy Storage

Dear Colleagues, 

Aqueous energy storage devices, such as aqueous batteries and aqueous supercapacitors, offer tremendous competitiveness in terms of their low cost, safe operation, easy preparation, high power density and extraordinary cycling stability. Due to the narrow electrochemical stability window of water (about 1.23 V), aqueous energy storage devices usually provide low operating output voltage and insufficient energy density for practical energy supply applications. Based on decoupling redox reactions at each electrode that break the thermodynamic barrier of water, some polymer hydrogel electrolytes (such as polyacrylamide hydrogels) can suppress oxygen evolution upon bonding to water through hydrogen bonding, and boost the operation voltage to more than 2 V. Additionally, heteroatom-doped carbon aerogels not only possess a unique three-dimensional continuous porous architecture that accommodates a large number of electrolyte ions for electrical double-layer capacitance, but they also provide heteroatom-based active sites to produce faradaic pseudocapacitance to further boost energy density. Although some significant advances have been made in aqueous energy storage, there is still tremendous room for improvement regarding the gel-based aqueous energy storage devices, from the structural design of hydrogels/aerogels to the energy storage mechanisms of batteries/supercapacitors. In the future, unremitting efforts are still required to develop high-power, high-energy aqueous batteries and supercapacitors as the new-generation energy storage devices for meeting the commercial energy supply demands.

Dr. Chao Yang
Guest Editor

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