From
Timetable to
Place Amphi Dorothy Hodgkin
Title
Functionalized graphene nanocomposites for energy storage and electrocatalysis
Abstract
Graphene based materials have known a huge development in the last decade due to their outstanding mechanical and electrical properties. However there are still issues to overcome to take benefit of these promising developments. Among them, the control of inter-sheet interactions is crucial to improve the processing when one wants to obtain stable suspensions or thin coatings on electrode surfaces. Chemical modification of graphene might help the sheet separation leading to an increase in the specific area, as well as the design of nanocomposites by incorporating another material in the inter-sheet space. We recently made advances in this field using tetrazine derivatives to functionalize graphene either through cycloaddition for highly reduced graphene oxide [1] or by nucleophilic substitution for the more oxidized graphene [2]. In a second step using electrochemistry, it was possible to design nanocomposites including metallic nanoparticles for electrocatalysis [3]. Meanwhile, new tetrazine derivatives were synthesized in the team that appeared very promising to improve the cycloaddition yield [4]. This should lead to highly functionalized graphene and also to materials in which electroactive bridges are created between graphene sheets, with huge electrochemical capacitance for energy storage. The topic of the thesis will consist in designing new nanocomposites combining efficiently graphene and metallic nanoparticles on one hand, conjugated polymers on the other hand. The final applications can be targeted toward energy storage, electrocatalysis among others depending on the composition of the nanocomposite.