As access to rare earths and other valuable transition metals narrows, the importance of identifying their potential replacements becomes a grand challenge. Cobalt is recognized as a material critical to the manufacture of Li-ion battery cathodes, but the supply of cobalt is limited. One potential alternative cathode material is polyaniline, which can be synthesized from domestic feedstock. Polyaniline is potentially an important material for organic energy storage applications because of polyaniline's high conductivity, specific energy, and cyclability. Indeed, the polyaniline-lithium rechargeable battery (3V coin cell) was commercially available in the late 1980's to early 1990's from Bridgestone-Seiko. However, polyaniline's low specific power presents a major challenge to overcome. We propose that polyaniline/V2O5 cathodes made using layer-by-layer (LbL) assembly technique can potentially overcome these challenges by carefully controlling (i) molecular structure via chemical synthesis, (ii) electrode topography, and (iii) mixing via LbL assembly.

Polyaniline-containing layer-by-layer assembies: Towards organic energy storage

242nd National Meeting (2011)

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