Effect of Washing on the Electrochemical Performance of a Three-Dimensional Current Collector for Energy Storage Applications.

The development of efficient materials for energy storage applications has attracted considerable attention, especially for supercapacitors and batteries that are the most promising and important power sources in everyday life. For this purpose, a suitable and efficient current collector must be determined and its behavior with respect to various solvents when it is used as an electrode material for energy storage applications should be understood. In this work, we studied the effect of washing three-dimensional nickel foam using different concentrations of hydrochloric acid and ethanol on the surface characteristics, electrochemical behavior, and storage performance of the foam. Additionally, we observed the different types of acidic treatments that improved the electrochemical and storage performances of the three-dimensional nickel foam. The surface characterization results show that acidic conditions with a concentration of 3M changes the surface morphology from a flat/hill-like structure to a nanosheet/nanoflake-like structure without any further treatment. This structure provides a nano-channel and a large number of surface charges during the electrochemical reaction. The results of this study show that pretreatment of 3D-NF is highly important and recommended. The present work also contributes to the knowledgebase on pretreatment of 3D-NF and its optimization.