Jean Ruthes and Volker Presser present at the 2nd Franco-German Summer Workshop on High Power Devices in Nantes (France).

Volker speaks about “MXene and hybrid electrodes for high performance energy storage” on the 21st of June.

Jean speaks about “Hydrogel-based flexible energy storage using electrodes based on polypyrrole and carbon threads” on the 23rd of June.

Volker Presser gives an online talk entitled “Electrochemical Desalination” as part of the Nanohubs Program of the Department of Science and Technology in the Philippines within the Theme “Empowering Young Filipino Researchers for an Emerging Technology Ready Philippines”.

New work published in Carbon in collaboration with Prof. Choonsoo Kim. In our research, we explore the impact of different carbon types on desalination capacity and rate. We exemplify the impact of conventional carbon black, nanoscaled carbon onions, and micro-mesoporous carbons. In the early cycles, we observed that using AC electrodes without additives resulted in a higher desalination capacity, reaching approximately 10 mg/g. However, there was a trade-off: the desalination rate was slightly lower. It turns out that larger AC particles limited the transportation of ions within the electrode due to the increased diffusion path length.

By incorporating small and less porous additives, we achieved the highest desalination rate (20 μg/g/s) as the additive particles reduced the ion diffusion path length by increasing size dispersion, thus enhancing overall ion transport and desalination rates.

Welcome new Postdoc Jian Zhou, who will be working on electrochemical desalination with us.