Fig. 6: Accelerating discharging by voltage inversion.
a Voltage with respect to the bulk electrolyte as a function of time for step-voltage discharging (red line) and for three voltage-inversion sweeps given by eq. (10) (top plot). Bottom plot shows the charge in the nanopore obtained by MD simulations after application of the inversion sweeps, eq. (10), to a model supercapacitor shown in Fig. 1d. The nanopore was initially fully charged at potential Uch = 3 V with respect to the bulk electrolyte. The inversion voltage is Uinv = −2.5 V and the optimal kinv value is kinv = 5.5 V/ns. The results are an average of 5 independent simulations. b Discharging time as a function of Uinv, calculated at optimal kinv values. The resulting optimal (Uinv, kinv) pair is (−2.5 V, 5.5 V/ns) for our supercapacitor fully charged at Uch = 3 V. In all plots the pore width is w = 0.6 nm and the pore length ℓ = 12 nm.
