Metal Cation Pre-Intercalated Ti3C2Tx MXene as Ultra-High Areal Capacitance Electrodes for Aqueous Supercapacitors
Summary¶
Two-dimensional Ti₃C₂Tₓ MXenes are strong candidates for electrochemical energy storage because they combine metallic conductivity with intercalation-capable galleries. Delaminated films achieve excellent gravimetric and volumetric capacitance, but thin electrodes limit areal capacitance, which matters for packaged devices and roll-to-roll manufacturing. Prenger et al. report multilayer Ti₃C₂Tₓ electrodes pre-intercalated with Na⁺, K⁺, and Mg²⁺, with areal loadings from 5.2 to 20.1 mg cm⁻², and evaluate them in aqueous acid (H₂SO₄) supercapacitor configurations. The local corpus PDF is a galley/proof (Prenger_ACS_AEM_2022_galley.pdf); final pagination may differ from the version of record for DOI 10.1021/acsaem.2c00653.
Methods¶
Canonical article: [[2022kaitlyn-prenger-acs-metal-cation]] (ACS AEM version-of-record PDF). This slug tracks a galley duplicate; numerical protocols should be verified there.
A — Electrode fabrication¶
- Thick, scalable multilayer Ti₃C₂Tₓ with Na⁺, K⁺, Mg²⁺ pre-intercalation and controlled mass loading.
B — Electrochemical characterization¶
- Cyclic voltammetry (and related tests) vs scan rate; gravimetric and areal capacitance benchmarks vs delaminated and microengineered MXene literature (see abstract).
- Full PDF needed for cell geometry, electrolyte, potential window, EIS—not fully captured in short extracts.
Findings¶
The introduction contrasts pseudocapacitive oxides that suffer poor conductivity (for example MnO₂ conductivities on the order of 10⁻⁵–10⁻⁶ S cm⁻¹ in the text) with MXenes, which combine metallic conductivity with intercalation-friendly galleries, motivating Ti₃C₂Tₓ as an electrode platform. Across the scan rates examined in the electrochemical study, K–Ti₃C₂Tₓ delivers the highest capacitances. Gravimetric capacitance reaches up to about 300 F g⁻¹, described as comparable to delaminated MXene, while areal capacitance reaches up to about 5.7 F cm⁻². The authors contrast this areal performance with about 0.5 F cm⁻² typical of thin delaminated electrodes (thickness 2–20 µm in the discussion) and about 4.0 F cm⁻² for certain microengineered MXene electrodes cited in the paper, framing multilayer pre-intercalation as a route to high areal storage without abandoning scalable processing.
Limitations¶
The ingested file is a galley; layout, figure resolution, and minor text may differ from the final ACS AEM PDF. The study focuses on aqueous acid testing conditions; long-term cycling, rate capability tradeoffs, and translation to non-aqueous systems require reading the full article and any Supporting Information. Atomistic interpretation of intercalation (e.g., ReaxFF) is not the focus of this experimental report.
Confidence rationale: med because performance numbers come from the extract/abstract but the corpus holds a galley PDF.