Synthesis and Characterization of Nanostructured Metal Sulfides rGO Electrodes for Energy Generation and Storage Applications

Abstract

Fossil fuel consumption has made a huge impact on the environment due to the rapid newlineincreases in population, urbanization, and industrialization. At the same time, the energy newlineconsumption per capita also has increased globally. Further, by 2035 the energy demand will newlinebe increased by 40% of the current demand, therefore the energy generation and storage from newlinerenewable sources is attracting very much interest to overcome the energy demand across the newlineworld. In mitigating environmental pollution and energy harvesting applications, newlinenanomaterials play a predominant role. Among various nanomaterials, metal sulfides have newlineattracted the entire scientific community, because of their unique optical, electrical, and newlinemechanical properties. newlineAmong various metal sulfides, MoS2, and NiS are commonly less explored as newlineelectrodes for H2 generation, Li-ion battery, and supercapacitor applications. In photocatalytic newlineH2 generation, the conductivity of charge carriers, charge recombination, and charge transfer newlinekinetics are the major problems. In both batteries as well as supercapacitors these metal sulfides newlinehave limitations such as lower electrical conductivity, and structural deformation during the newlinecharging and discharging. To overcome these issues graphene or reduced graphene oxide newline(RGO) has been composited with metal sulfides, which leads to enhancing the metal sulfide newlineproperties in H2 generation, Li-ion battery, and supercapacitor applications. However, the newlinemultistep synthesis process, longer duration procedures, structure-directing chemicals, are newlinebeing used for the synthesis of metal sulfides/RGO nanocomposites, which are not the reliable newlineprocess for implementing in large scale production. Therefore, a simple, fast, and one-pot newlinesynthesis process such as supercritical fluid (SCF)-based techniques are explored in this work. newlineIn the present work, we have demonstrated exfoliation and synthesis of MoS2-RGO and newlineNiS-RGO nanostructures with different weight percent of RGO by a simple, fast, and one-pot newlineSCF process techniq