Liwen Hu

Abstract:

In the past decades, micro emulsion synthesis has been demonstrated to be efficient soft colloidal templates in preparing nanopowders of metal oxides for its feasible and precise control of size, shape and crystallinity. For most soft colloidal-template syntheses of nanoparticles are confined in the water phase, water-in-oil namely reverse micelles or micro emulsions have attracted much more attention. Water-in-oil (W/O) micro emulsion is an isotropic, thermodynamically stable dispersion of water phase wrapped by surfactant and co-surfactant in a continuous oil phase, which has been extensively employed as soft template for the synthesis of nanoparticles or nanostructure materials. Typically, for the soft-colloidal template synthesis of target materials, usually two different reverse micelles or micro emulsion droplets containing two types of reaction precursors are first prepared. The reaction is enabled once two different droplets fluctuate and collide with each other. Then followed by a complicated separation step. Here, we extend this kind of novel electrolyte to an electrochemical cell, in situ assemblies of metal oxide and applied to an electrode of super capacitor. The results showed that the metal oxides are in uniform morphologies and an outstanding capacitive performance was obtained.