Uranium-based electrode material for the high-performance supercapacitors

In recent decades, significant progress has been made in the engineering of electrode materials for supercapacitors. In this regard, the primary emphasis has been on investigating carbonaceous based materials. However, this focus has restricted the overall capacitance of supercapacitor devices, thus hindering their broader application possibilities. There is still a gap in the literature on high-performance radioactive element-based electrode materials. Bearing this, in this work, a simple approach was suggested for the implementation of uranium, as a radioactive element, decorating onto carbon architecture, as electrode material in high-energy supercapacitor cells. Herein, a facile pathway for tailoring a uranium-decorated graphene oxide nanostructure (U-GOx; where x stands for the GO:U ratio by weight) was proposed and the potential applications of the synthesized nanoarchitectures as an electrode material of supercapacitor cell were investigated. As per the author's knowledge, for the first time in the ever-burgeoning field of energy storage systems, a radioactive compound-based supercapacitor cell was fabricated. The physicochemical characterizations confirmed the successful anchoring of uranium atoms onto the graphene oxide skeleton. The U-GO5 electrode-based-supercapacitor cell offered the highest performance metrics with a 95.92 % capacitance retention value at the end of the 15,000 consecutive galvanostatic charge-discharge cycles, besides the high specific capacitance value of 258.6 F⸱g−1 at a high current density value of 10.0 A⸱g−1. Moreover, the radioactivity measurements were conducted to investigate whether the fabricated supercapacitors were radioactive or not. The results revealed that the measured radiation dose of the U-GO5-based supercapacitor cell before the GCD cycles, which was of the highest uranium content, was ca.0.06 μSv (the background measurement was excluded). This finding indicated there would be no adverse effect on human health or the environment. It can be speculated that this work is a new era for engineering a high-performance supercapacitor based on organic electrodes decorated with a radioactive element.