Conjugated Copolymer Design in Phenothiazine-Based Battery Materials Enables High Mass Loading Electrodes
Pascal Acker, Jan S. Wössner, Gauthier Desmaizieres, Birgit Esser
Abstract
Organic electrode materials are considered to be promising candidates for alternative and greener energy storage solutions. Due to their intrinsic low conductivity, however, usually large amounts of conductive additives are required for electrode fabrication. Herein, we investigate electrodes with a 90 wt % active material ratio and high mass loadings of up to 4.3 mg cm–2, which show good cycling performance because of the conjugated copolymer structure chosen for the phenothiazine-based active material. By furthermore reducing the inactive weight within the polymer through structural modification and raising the potential range during constant current measurements we increased the discharge capacity for the whole composite by a factor of 12 to 0.169 mAh cm–2 compared to a previous study. This study demonstrates that conjugated organic copolymers are attractive electrode materials due to their intrinsic conductivity combined with the presence of defined redox centers.