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Microplastic and metal waste from electronic industries are becoming a major threat to the environment and marine ecosystem. Green processing and employing natural derived materials are solutions to this issue. In this work, an electrical double-layer capacitor (EDLC) fabricated from green polymer electrolyte (GPE) sandwiched in between two microbial cellulose-based electrodes is characterized. The eco-friendly electrode films of interconnected cellulose and multiwalled carbon nanotube (MWCNT) are obtained via harmless, inexpensive, and simple procedure. The GPE consists of methylcellulose-potato starch blend as polymer blend and ammonium iodide (NH4I) is chosen as ion provider. Glycerol serves as plasticization agent for alternative pathways enabling ionic migration. The most optimum GPE possesses good ionic conductivity of ∼ 10−3 S/cm. Ions are the dominant charge carrier in the GPE as ion transference number shown to be close to unity. Linear sweep voltammetry (LSV) analysis illustrated that the GPE is electrochemically stable up to 2.4 V. The green EDLC stores energy through non-Faradaic mechanism and the specific capacitance from charge-discharge, Ccd is influenced by the sweep rates. The EDLC can be charged and discharged up to 2 V with a stable 1000 cyclability performance. This work implied the potential of microbial cellulose-based EDLC as ideal green-based energy storage device for low voltage applications such as smart electronic textiles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Spinel lithium manganese oxide, LiMn2O4 coated with V2O5 layer (labeled as LMO‐VO) has been developed and its electrochemical performances as cathode material for lithium‐ion batteries has been evaluated at high cut‐off voltage (>4.5 V vs. Li/Li+) and compared with pristine LiMn2O4 (labeled as LMO). The crystal structure investigations show that LMO‐VO has longer Li–O bond length for fast Li‐ion diffusion kinetic process. The scanning electron microscopy results indicate that LMO‐VO has finer particles and the V2O5 layer has been successfully coated on the LMO surface uniformly. The highly conductive V2O5 coating layer enhances the ionic conductivity of the LMO cathode, as evidenced by the significant drop of Rct value from the Nyquist plot. Under high operating voltage, the cell employed with coated LMO shows exceptional cycling performance in capacity retention and potential difference. After 300 cycles, the capacity retention per cycle has been boosted from 99.90% to 99.94% by adopting the V2O5 coating layer. In addition, surface coating with V2O5 stabilizes the potential difference at very minimal change for a longer period. This convincingly proves that the V2O5 coating layer not only protects against hydrofluoric acid (HF) attack and greatly restrains the increase of cell polarization at high voltage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An amphiphile molecule consisting of triazole moiety has been thoroughly investigated using different approaches in its aqueous condition. The studies have discovered the explicit function of its heteroaromatic ability in molecular self‐assembling. From the fluorescence evidence, the triazole‐based amphiphile has shown that the aggregation‐induced emission behavior is mainly due to the triazolyl. It suggests that the triazole is directly involved in the self‐assembling mechanism through an intermolecular interaction. This interaction can be verified by the shifting of proton frequency of the triazole, which is clearly shown by the constant frequency of the proton above the critical micellar concentration (CMC) value. The frequency suggests the establishing hydrogen bond that occurred between the hydrogen and the second nitrogen of the adjacent triazole. These results are consistent with the micellization of the molecule which was determined at a very low CMC value (0.1 mM). The absorbance and optical polarizing microscopy results also support the evidence of the growth of giant vesicles produced from the neutralization of the amphiphile. The formation of stable giant vesicles at neutral pH demonstrates the immediate strong hydrogen bonding connections within the triazoles layer in the bilayer. The discovery reveals that internal hydrogen bonds formed from a heteroaromatic with the appropriate molecular arrangement can promote self‐aggregation and enhance overall stability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]