Rational Design of Multidimensional Organic Electrodes for Sustainable Energy Storage

Abstract

Organic molecules with redox-active motifs are of great interest as next-generation electrodes for sustainable energy storage due to their inherent advantages of lightness, high theoretical capacity, low environmental footprint, and molecular tunability. Although there has been significant progress in designing various redox-active molecules, the practical requirements of high electrochemical activity and rapid kinetics for fast charging, are motivating a search for methods to engineer the architectures of organic-based electrodes. This dissertation reports the structural and molecular design of multidimensional organic electrodes to realize high-performance organic batteries with high energy and power densities. A general platform for the development of ultrathick nanohybrids of multi-redox organic/graphene/cellulose is demonstrated, and a lithographic fabrication strategy for realizing a 3D periodic, bicontinuous nano-network is introduced. Finally, an outlook is also provided on a new redox-active system based on subdomained graphene quantum dots (GQDs), opening up intriguing possibilities for expediting the practical applications of organic materials to realize fast and sustainable energy storage.