The image posted above shows a typical Swagelok type cell, which comes in 2 or 3 electrode configuration. This is a nice choice for conducting preliminary electrochemical tests on supercapcaitors if you are not planning to make a permanent cell out of it. It can be used again and again, and for the assembly, all you have to do is to place your electrode|electrolyte|electrode material inside and seal it by twisting it. It seals the assembly nicely.

But there are several drawbacks to it as well. First one is that it is not a permanent cell assembly. It is a temporary assembly where you can put your materials in and seal it to test it out. Moreover, these cells are not usually airtight, so if there are some materials susceptible to degradation upon exposure to ambient air, they can go under degradation. Also, the pressure applied on the cell assembly plays an important role in making the electrode-electrolyte interface more connected, mostly in cases of polymer electrolytes. In case of swagelok cells, one can't apply the same amount of pressure to all of your cell assemblies while using swagelok cells.

Therefore, for preliminary tests and assemblies, swagelok cells can be employed for the purposes. Otherwise, use of coin cells (most common one is CR2302 coin cell) might be useful if there is a crimping machine and die cutter machine in your lab. these can be useful in cases of complete full cell assemblies.

Another kind of full cell assembly is Pouch cells assembly, which are usually employed for flexible supercapcaitor or battery applications. These pouch cells can be tested in differnet conditions, such as bending and twisting.

All of the above cell assembly types works well with both liquid and polymer electrolytes.

Dear Chitransh Upreti ,

First of all, thank you very much for your full of explanation answer.

yes, i need it for temporary use, i mean it's just for research purpose.

and regarding, air and materials degradation i saw some videos showing that researchers are covering swagelok cells with para film, so i think this will reduce the amount of air entering the cell.

also, what should i buy as tools to prepare the electrodes, i mean if there are any special tweezers to hold the electrode, or punch to cut cylindrical electrode for measurement.

thanks again,

Yes, the parafilm is used to make it air tight, but use of teflon tape is better for this purpose. regarding the tools required for the electrode material preparation, you need some tools to punch your electrodes:

You might need a tool for cutting your current collector/substrate. In the electrode material preparation, you need to cut your current collector beforehand if you are planning to go with drop casting. for that purpose, there are round punch hole cutters which can cut your current collector substrate correctly, and they are good for cutting activated graphite paper, as these papers are brittle and fragile. These are inexpensive too as compared to die cutter machines.

There are some die cutting machines which comes with differrent set of die sizes so you can cut your separator slighlty bigger than the electrode substrate. They also works well with etched foils and cuts them nicely (for etched foils, It is done after coating the electrode material slurry onto the rough side of foil, drying it and then cutting it with the help of die cutters).

In the handling part like special tweezers or some other tools, you can always lift your electrode with weighing paper, but if are not comfortable in using those, you can take any blunt tweezer (you can search for eyebrow tweezers online) and stick square shaped weighing paper onto the inner sides of tweezers (keep the weighing paper a bit oversized as compared to the tip of the tweezer). In this way, you can get a tweezer with a soft touch, which won't be harsh on your coated electrode. Otherwise, there are some plastic tipped tweezers available.

thank you for information, i did search online for the tools you mentioned above.

i still little bit confused, whats the difference between three and two electrode swagelok cell? and which one i should choose? also if the cells come with integrated electrodes (ref, counter electrode) ?

The image below exibits the difference between a 2-electrode swagelok cell and a 3-electrode swagelok cell. A 3-electrode system in any kind of assembly has an extra reference electrode (RE), apart from our working electrode (WE) and counter electrode (CE).

I have never worked in 3-electrode systems, so I don't know much about 3-electrode systems, but I know one reason of having a reference electrode (RE) is that the RE provides a refernce potential to measure potential across RE and WE as well as RE and CE instead of WE and CE.

In 2-electrode systems, the contribution due to CE adds up with that of WE, which gives the potential as the combined effect of both the electrodes.

But in real life applications, there are no 3 electrode systems available (you never see a 3 terminal battery). Therefore, If you are interested in complete device performance rather than observing the performance of individual electrodes, you can go to 2-electrode swagelok cells. Otherwise, you can assemble half cells in 2-electrode swagelok cells by taking reference electrode (RE) material as your counter electrode (CE).

PS: the material used in these 3-electrode swagelok cells is usually a platinum mesh.