RFBR Project №18-33-00682

Period: 2018–2020

Conductive polymers are traditional components of energy storage devices. Among them, a special class of substances stands out, polymer metal complexes with salen-type ligands (salen = N, N'-ethylene-bis (salicylidenimine)). Interest in the use of these materials is due to their high capacity and charge-discharge rate, which allows them to be used in power supplies with high power. Among the possible types of such current sources, supercapacitors with a non-aqueous electrolyte are attracting increased attention due to the wide window of electrochemical stability of the solvents used, which provides a large amount of energy stored by the device. However, any solvent inevitably contains water (at least in trace amounts), which, in turn, leads to gradual degradation of the electrode material and a decrease in the life of the device. The data on the degradation of complexes of transition metals with Schiff bases in the presence of water, presented in the literature, are clearly insufficient for understanding the detailed mechanism of this process, since they contain results obtained using only electrochemical methods and refer to single complexes. As a result, the search for new materials based on such complexes to be used as DSC modifiers is carried out by trial and error, which requires huge time and financial costs and turns out to be, as a result, ineffective. An alternative, rational way of searching for new materials is possible only if we understand the detailed mechanism of degradation of complexes of transition metals with Schiff bases in dry electrolytes and in the presence of water, followed by a targeted synthesis of new stable structures, which is the goal of the proposed project.