Editorial overview: Porous electrodes for energy applications

Abstract

Porous electrodes are essential and high-performance components, which determine the performance of batteries, fuel cells, electrolysis cells, and further electrochemical devices. Improving their performance is a complex endeavor as the situation inside the electrodes is hard to grasp and control. This special collection brings together a series of valuable contributions regarding advanced experimental investigations and modeling studies of porous electrodes used in electrochemical devices for energy applications.

Porous electrodes should provide a sufficiently large surface area for the catalyzed reactions. Very often, the solid porous structure consists of several materials with very different functions such as catalytic activity and electronic or ionic conductivity. The pore system of these electrodes must be optimally designed for the transport of the various reacting species through diffusion, migration, and convection. Moreover, the presence of different phases (liquid electrolytes, gases) in the porous solid matrix of the electrodes leads to an extremely high complexity of the occurring processes. Obviously, there is a great need for improved experimental techniques for the determination of transport parameters and the precise characterization of the porous electrode structures. Based on this information, the development of detailed physicochemically based electrode models will allow for an optimal design of the porous electrodes with even better performance of energy-related electrochemical devices.

The overall 11 contributions in this collection cover different electrochemical applications such as lithium-ion batteries, carbon dioxide electrolysis, fuel cells, supercapacitors, and solar cells. In addition to experimental studies devoted to the characterization of the pore system and the determination of important performance parameters, improved models for electrodes and cells are another focus of this special issue. As guest editors appointed by Electrochemical Science Advances, we would like to thank all authors for their valuable contributions, the reviewers for their thoughtful comments, and the publisher Brian P. Johnson for his kind support. We do hope that this special collection on porous electrodes will provide some useful insights for the future development of improved technologies for energy storage and conversion.

The authors declare no conflict of interest.