Conductive Organic-based Materials for ElecTrochemical energy Storage – COMETS

With the population growing and the massive electrification of our life (mobility, technology, …), the number of electrical storage systems will exponentially increase in the future and will induce a considerable demand for raw minerals. One promising alternative to counter-balance this issue is to take benefits of the versatility of organic compounds to substitute most critical materials compounds, such as electrodes, and release the pressure on raw materials. Organic batteries stand as one of the most promising alternatives to address such a challenge but a major drawback of organic electrode materials is their insulating properties which compel one to add an important amount of conductive additive when building the electrode. The additive content is generally around 30% in weight but can even reach 50% or more. Despite strong efforts, this limitation has not yet found a satisfying solution and is a key challenge to increase the electrode energy density and then enable real prototyping.
Project COMETS ambitions to bring together the expertise of two groups related to the design of conductive molecular materials and electrochemical energy storage applications, to solve the conductivity issue of organic batteries. One promising option, not yet fully investigated, is to exploit conduction properties of organic crystalline material like charge transfer complexes or organic radical salts to afford conductive additive-free electrodes. In this sense, there is potentially a large number of organic compounds already available for other applications (electronics), that could be used for battery applications according to careful design. Evaluating the storage performances and/or electrical conductivity performances of such organic-based conductive materials represents the finality and the originality of project COMETS.