Title: Carbon-based materials for energy storage applications

Abstract

Considering the serious impacts of climate change caused by greenhouse gases, it is vital to eliminate fossil fuel consumption immediately. Rechargeable batteries have been presented as clean energy storage devices for several applications including but not limited to electric vehicles. It is essential to design high performance electrode materials to reach high energy density and long cycle life in batteries. Carbon nanofibers have been widely studied as energy storage materials in high performance batteries and supercapacitors owing to their high conductivity and good mechanical properties along with tunable morphology. Electrospinning has been commonly employed to fabricate carbon nanofibers. In this study, novel carbon nanofiber-based structures for high performance sodium ion batteries were fabricated via novel, fast and cost-effective technique without applying high voltage. Moreover, several techniques were introduced to modify the morphology and thus improve the performance of carbon nanofiber-based electrode materials. Using sacrificial, low cost polymers; adding highly conductive additives with high surface area; nitrogen doping is some of the techniques used to enhance the electrochemical properties of electrode materials. Besides traditional techniques, binder-free electrodes were also studied. As a result, high specific capacity was observed from carbon nanofiber-based electrodes.