UC Riverside

Over the past two decades, there has been extensive development in the field of renewable energy and energy storage technologies in an effort to keep up with the pace of continuously rising global energy demand as the world abroad continues to develop into technology and energy driven societies. The race for renewables especially is driven by the ever-looming threat of climate change and rising global temperatures caused by greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels and natural gas power sources. Renewable energy generation infrastructure and technology has grown dramatically since the early 2000s to the point that we are getting close to potential overgeneration for energy grids without the sufficient energy storage technologies to back up any excess power generation during the peak generation times of the day for solar and wind technologies. While renewable energy technology has advanced drastically, the same pace has not been kept with energy storage technologies especially in the battery field with the last major development being the Li-ion battery cells. As the demand has continued to grow with new consumer technologies such as phones, computers, and electric vehicles, we have continued to deplete the natural resources required for creating these batteries such as lithium and cobalt and need to start looking elsewhere to alternatives. 2D materials have been a promising avenue for many different technology sectors and batteries are no exception. MXenes are a new class of 2D material that shows promise as a new candidate for energy storage technologies that has the potential to revolutionize this field, but suffers from a lack of scalable synthesis methods to make the material viable on a large industrial scale. In this study, we will be evaluating a novel sol-gel method to synthesize MXenes that has the potential to be scalable with an emphasis on being a renewable and environmentally friendly process. While there is still much work to be done to make this a reality, this will lay the groundwork and foundation to bring this idea to fruition.