Silicon nanowires for energy generation and storage

• Autores: Sergio Pinilla
• Directores de la Tesis: Carmen Morant Zacarés (dir. tes.)
• Lectura: En la Universidad Autónoma de Madrid ( España ) en 2017
• Idioma: inglés
• Tribunal Calificador de la Tesis: Pilar Ocón Esteban (presid.), José Luis Pau Vizcaino (secret.), José Lorenzo Balenzategui Manzanares (voc.), Francisco Manuel Márquez (voc.), Olga Sánchez Garrido (voc.)
• Materias:
  • Física
    • Química física
      • Electroquímica
• Enlaces
  • Tesis en acceso abierto en: Biblos-e Archivo
• Resumen

  • In the past few decades, an increasing interest has been growing towards the nanostructured materials. Their enhanced properties have opened a whole new investigation field with applications in almost every area of knowledge. Specifically, silicon nanomaterials have attracted much attention owing to its abundance, relatively low price and large variety of applications. Among the Si nanostructured materials, one-dimensional silicon nanowires (SiNWs) are of particular interest. There are several SiNWs synthesis processes (bottom-up and top-down approaches), however, most of these synthesis methods either suffer from scalability issues or compromise the quality of SiNWs. Therefore, new methods to develop high-quality SiNWs in a scalable manner is of great importance and highly necessary. In this research, a new synthesis procedure based on the metal assisted chemical etching approach (MACE) has been used. This method provides the quality and scalability necessary for industrial level applications.

    The present work, has been focused on the synthesis of SiNWs and the study of their performances in solar cells and LIBs. Our studies on solar cells aimed at improving the light absorption and reducing the surface recombination. These goals were successfully obtained using patterned SiNWs, along with other nanomaterials, such as carbon nanotubes.

    The implementation of SiNWs in the LIBs has been carried out in three innovative electrode architectures. The introduced innovations ranged from the exploitation of synergies between nanomaterials, to the direct growth of large amounts of amorphous SiNWs on the current collector. Each of these architectures has been systematically studied by galvanostatic cycling, achieving a good description of the electrodes performance. Finally, another family of materials called MXenes has been studied. These 2D materials show promising properties which paired with SiNWs could lead to a very interesting hybrid material for LIBs.