Skip to main content
eScholarship
Open Access Publications from the University of California

UCLA

UCLA Electronic Theses and Dissertations bannerUCLA

Solution Phase Routes to Functional Nanostructured Materials for Energy Applications

Abstract

Solution-phase processing presents an attractive avenue for building unique architectures from a wide variety of materials that exhibit functional properties, making them ideal candidates for various energy applications. The most basic building block or precursor in solution-based syntheses is a soluble species that can either self-assemble, or coassemble with a structure directing agent or template, to create a unique architecture. Soluble inorganic-based building blocks ranging from atomic-scale charged molecular complexes to nanometer-scale preformed nanocrystals are utilized to construct functional inorganic materials. These nanostructured materials are excellent candidates for integrating into electronic and energy-storage devices, including photovoltaics and pseudocapacitors.

The goal of this work is to create inorganic nanostructured materials from solution-based methods. This work is divided into two parts: the first involves the synthesis of inorganic semiconductor-based nanostructured materials; the second focuses on developing porous metal oxide-based pseudocapacitors.

The first part describes three distinct synthetic approaches to nanostructured semiconductors: the synthesis of complex metal chalcogenide semiconductors produced from highly soluble hydrazinium-based precursors using a porous template; low-temperature melt processing of an organic-inorganic hybrid semiconductor into porous templates to produce vertically-aligned arrays with a concentric multilayered structure; and solution-phase assembly of semiconductor nanocrystals of CdSe into nanoporous architectures via polymer templating. These nanostructured semiconductors are electrically interconnected through intimate contact between the molecular or nanoscale precursors achieved during solution-phase synthesis, making them suitable for a range of applications.

In the second part, porous metal-oxide based materials are constructed by the assembly of nanosized building blocks into 3D porous architectures via polymer templating. Two main approaches are described: first, a general route for templating both redox-active oxides (Mn3O4, MnFe2O4) and conducting indium tin oxide (ITO) nanocrystals is described; second, nanocrystal-based porous architectures of a ITO are coated with redox-active V2O5 via atomic layer deposition to produce nanoporous composites. The porous architectures exhibit high surface areas, providing ample redox active sites, and an interconnected open porosity, facilitating solvent/ion diffusion to those sites. In the ITO-V2O5 composites, the electron-transfer reactions are facilitated by the increased conductivity leading to high pseudocapacitive contributions to charge storage that are accompanied by fast charging/discharging rates.

Main Content
For improved accessibility of PDF content, download the file to your device.
Current View