More than a pretty picture, star-shaped nanomaterial changes energy storage
When created at the nanoscale, materials can resemble shapes like stars, rods or even pyramids. These particle shapes, also known as the morphologies of a solid, make for more than just interesting images under a microscope—they ...
When this metal-based chemical initially formed as flat, sheet-like layers, it stored energy internally like a battery. But as it evolved into clustered rods and eventually star-shaped structures, its behavior shifted toward that of a pseudocapacitor, storing energy at or near its surface.
"By simply changing a material's morphology, you can change its electrochemical behavior and thereby change what you can do with it," says Luis De Jesús Báez, Ph.D., assistant professor in the UB Department of Chemistry and corresponding author of a study published in Nanoscale.
The findings could provide insights for designing hybrid energy storage systems that deliver energy quickly like a capacitor while also storing it for longer like a battery. They also suggest that controlling a material's shape could influence how its electrons behave, a key factor in emerging technologies such as quantum and neuromorphic computing.
"We are learning more and more that a material's properties are not just determined by chemical composition or atomic crystal structure—morphology also needs to be taken into account," De Jesús Báez says.
A scanning electron microscope image reveals particles of vanadyl hydroxide (VOOH) shaped like stars. The team of Luis De Jesús Báez found that these particles behaved more like a pseudocapacitor than a battery. Credit: Luis De Jesús Báez/University at Buffalo