Electrochemical dealloying using pulsed voltage waveforms and its application for supercapacitor electrodes

Dealloying is an important industrial technique for generating nanoporous metallic structures by selectively leaching out the more reactive metal component from an alloy material. A constant voltage is often applied to facilitate the dealloying process. Here we report the first study on dealloying with the application of a voltage waveform-specifically, pulsed voltage waveforms are applied for dealloying Ni-Cu alloys. It is found that pulsed dealloying voltage waveforms can exert a strong impact on the dealloying process by 1) significantly lowering the compositional threshold of the more reactive metal component for the dealloying reaction to take place, 2) more thoroughly removing the more reactive metal component and thus producing a porous metal of higher purity and higher porosity (volume fraction of voids), and 3) greatly affecting the morphology of the generated porous metal structure (e.g., leading to significantly thinner ligaments). The nanoporous metallic materials obtained by the pulsed voltage waveform enable supercapacitor electrodes of significantly better performance than the counterpart dealloyed with a constant voltage.