Synthesis and Characterization of Carbon Nanostructures for Supercapacitors

Download or read book Synthesis and Characterization of Carbon Nanostructures for Supercapacitors written by Sanliang Zhang and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Supercapacitors, also known as electrochemical capacitors or ultracapacitors, have been playing an ever increasing important role in bridging the performance gap between electrolytic capacitors and batteries since their inception in the 1960s. Either working as an independent power source or as a complement for batteries, therefore, supercapacitors have been indispensable in a number of applications due to their extraordinary high power density and fit-and-forget benefit. More recently, with the increasing awareness of their performance characteristics, supercapacitors are finding their way to more applicable niche markets. As the major working medium inside supercapacitors, high surface area activated carbon is dominating current commercial supercapacitors. Over the past decades, major advances have occurred in both understanding and improving the electrochemical performance of supercapacitors. In this work, some novel porous carbon nanostructures have been investigated as a substitute or performance enhancer for activated carbon inside supercapacitors. Moreover, we also summarized the inconsistencies for supercapacitors performance evaluation and provided some possible solutions. Chapter 1 provided a general overview of the basic working principle of supercapacitors and their constituting components (aka electrode, electrolyte, separator, current collector and additives). Chapter 2 presented a novel electrode fabrication method, named vacuum filtration deposition, to produce graphene-based supercapacitor electrodes. This vacuum filtration deposition method greatly improved the mass loading of graphene-based supercapacitor electrodes and therefore increased their energy storage ability. Chapter 3 discussed the effect of graphene morphology on the electrochemical performance of resulting supercapacitor electrodes. We concluded that crumpled graphene is favorable in supercapacitor applications compared to their planar counterpart. Chapter 4 demonstrated the performance enhancement of conventional activated carbon based supercapacitor upon graphene addition. 50 % increase in power density was concluded, which might have profound practical impact to the industry. Chapter 5 summarized some of the inconsistencies we encountered for the evaluation of supercapacitors, which severely hindered effective communication in the field. We clarified those inconsistencies and proposed some approaches to mediate this issue. Chapter 6 recapped the major conclusions from our study and listed some possible future work.