Fabrication of Hierarchical Indium Vanadate Materials for Supercapacitor Application

Balachandran Subramanian; Manimuthu Veerappan; Karthikeyan Rajan; Zheming Chen; Chengzhi Hu; Fei Wang; Feng Wang; Mingshu Yang

doi:10.1002/gch2.202000002

Fabrication of Hierarchical Indium Vanadate Materials for Supercapacitor Application

Glob Chall. 2020 Sep 28;4(11):2000002. doi: 10.1002/gch2.202000002. eCollection 2020 Nov.

Authors

Balachandran Subramanian^{1

2}, Manimuthu Veerappan³, Karthikeyan Rajan⁴, Zheming Chen¹, Chengzhi Hu², Fei Wang³, Feng Wang¹, Mingshu Yang¹

Affiliations

¹ Beijing National Laboratory for Molecular Sciences Key Laboratory of Engineering Plastics Institute of Chemistry Chinese Academy of Sciences Zhongguancun North First Street 2 Beijing 100190 P. R. China.
² Department of Mechanical and Energy Engineering Southern University of Science and Technology Nanshan District Shenzhen Guangdong 518055 P. R. China.
³ Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering Southern University of Science and Technology Nanshan District Shenzhen Guangdong 518055 P. R. China.
⁴ Engineering Research Center for Hydrogen Energy Materials and Devices College of Rare Earths (CORE) Jiangxi University of Science and Technology Ganzhou Jiangxi 341000 P. R. China.

Abstract

Transition metal orthovanadates are emerging 2D materials for promising electrochemical energy storage applications. Facile hydrothermal method for nanocrystalline indium vanadate (InVO₄) semiconducting materials' fabrication is economical because of its direct chemical synthesis. X-ray diffraction studies, field emission scanning electron microscope (SEM) images, transmission electron microscopy (TEM), and photoelectron X-ray spectrum are used to describe the semiconductor materials as synthesized. InVO₄ microspheres have attracted a lot of attention in the energy and environmental sector. These microsphere-derived semiconductor materials are recognized to offer the advantages of their large surface area, tunable pore sizes, enhanced light absorption, efficient carrier (electron-hole) separation, superior electronic and optical behavior, and high durability. From the results of SEM and TEM, InVO₄ shows a microsphere construction with a mixture of nanosized particles. Diffuse reflectance UV-visible measurements are used to determine the bandgap, and it is found to be 2.1 eV for InVO₄. The electrochemical analysis reveals a superior performance of the pseudocapacitor with hydrothermally derived microspheres of InVO₄. Alongside an improved pseudocapacity, developed after 4000 cycles, it has excellent cycling stability with a retention of ≈94% of its original specific capacitance efficiency.

Keywords: InVO4; pseudocapacitors; silica‐encapsulated InVO4.