Grant: Research Tools and Instruments - Category 1 (<$150,000)

Diminishing fossil fuel resources, simultaneously increasing energy demands, and the rising awareness of the negative environmental impact of the current energy use, create an escalating pressure to develop electrochemical energy conversion and storage system. Solar cells and fuel cells can meet this demand by efficiently and cleanly converting sunlight/fuels to electricity, while batteries and supercapacitor devices can store energy for transportation applications. These new technologies, however, still require further development because their capacity to store energy is still too small, their cost too high, and in the case of fuel cells, their durability still requires improvement. In order to deal with materials issues that directly impact on commercialization of these technologies, nanoporous materials will be developed and used in fuel cell technology, battery, supercapacitor and solar cell system. The catalytic activity and selectivity of catalysts and the capacity and kinetics of nanoporous materials depend on the specific surface area, pore volume, and pore size distribution of the nanoporous materials. Hence it is important to have these microstructural properties when developing and testing novel nanomaterials. A Surface Analyzer uses physical adsorption of gases to determine specific surface area, pore volume, and pore size distribution of materials. The instrument's versatility allows for characterizing a wide variety of nanoporous materials such as, activated carbon, carbon nanotubes, graphenes, zeolites, and polymers, therefore the instrument will be an extremely useful tool for our electrochemical energy system group as well as to researchers in many engineering and science disciplines at the University of Waterloo.