Science Daily March 19, 2024
Mesoporous metal oxides exhibit excellent physicochemical properties and are widely used in various fields, including energy storage/conversion, catalysis, and sensors. Although several soft-template approaches are reported, high-temperature calcination for both metal oxide formation and template removal is necessary, which limits direct synthesis on a plastic substrate for flexible devices. Researchers in South Korea developed a universal synthetic approach that combines thermal activation and oxygen plasma to synthesize diverse mesoporous metal oxides (V2O5, V6O13, TiO2, Nb2O5, WO3, and MoO3) at low temperatures (150–200 °C), which could be applied to a flexible polymeric substrate. To demonstrate their method, they fabricated a flexible micro-supercapacitor fabricated by directly synthesizing mesoporous V2O5 on an indium-tin oxide-coated colorless polyimide film. It maintained energy storage performance well under severe bending conditions… read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE