No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

A Dissertation submitted to the Faculty of Science, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science. 28 October 2016. / Energy storage has become an important issue for society, there is a need for affordable and efficient devices that can store energy optimally. Supercapacitors are energy storage devices that can solve society’s energy storage problem. They can store the energy generated by renewable energy systems. In this work approaches will be studied that may be used to estimate capacitance of materials that can be used as the electrode of these devices. These materials must have high energy density, which will address one of the limitations of supercapacitors. To estimate the capacitance of the double layer, the double layer theory and ab initio numerical tools based on density functional theory (DFT) are used. The ab initio tools work with periodic systems, when charging the system one violates the periodicity of the system. This is overcome by using the effective screening medium method, which prevents energy divergent of the system. In this work different configurations of the water molecules are used to average the different orientations of water molecules in the electrolyte. The Pt(111) electrode is used, and electrolyte of sodium ion and water. In different configurations the sodium ion in the electrolyte is located at different positions. The capacitances calculated using two different approaches that we developed in this work are comparable to previously estimated capacitance. This is achieved by using minimal computational efforts. We obtained capacitance within that range. Double layer capacitance can be estimated to a good accuracy with the methods developed in this work. Though there are improvements that can be made on the methods that have been developed in this work to better estimate the double layer capacitance. And also more research has to be done in this field to come up with a theory that will accurately estimate capacitance. At the moment calculating the double layer capacitance is not trivial due to the lack of theory that describe the processes taking place at the surface of the electrode where the capacitance is calculated. / LG2017