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

The development of cost-competitive, highly efficient, and environmentally benign energy conversion and storage technologies is a major global challenge. Fuel cells can meet this demand by efficiently and cleanly converting fuels to electricity, while batteries and supercapacitor devices can store energy for smart grid and 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 and batteris, their durability still requires improvement. In order to deal with materials issues that directly impact on commercialization of these technologies, uniform and well-structured nanomaterials will be developed and used in fuel cell, battery and supercapacitor system. The durability, performance and capacity of these electrochemical energy systems depend on the nanomaterials. Hence it is important to optimize nanomaterials structure and precise control of composition and size which can drastically improve the performance of these electrochemical devices. Scanning Electrochemical Microscope (SECM) System presents a new, convenient and precise way to characterize the electrochemical reaction of catalysts and electrode materials for electrochemical energy application. SECM could map the surfaces based on differences of such properties as localized current flow, conductivity, surface potentials and surface topography. This method is able to study the electrochemical catalytic and degradation mechanism of the energy materials that are beneficial in improving fuel cells, batteries and supercapacitors. Therefore the SECM will be extremely useful for our electrochemical energy system team as well as to researchers in many engineering and science disciplines at the University of Waterloo.