Effects of Pore Structure on Performance of An Activated-Carbon Supercapacitor Electrode Recycled from Scrap Waste Tires

Abstract

It is important to address the challenges posed with the ever-increasing demand for energy supply and environmental sustainability. Activated carbon, which is the common material for commercial supercapacitor electrodes, is currently derived from petroleum-based precursors. This paper presents an effective synthetic method that utilizes waste tires as the precursor to prepare the activated carbon electrodes by the pyrolysis and chemical activation processes. Adjusting the activation parameters can tailor multiple physical properties of the resulting activated carbon, which in turns tunes the performance of the activated carbon electrode. Statistical multiple linear regression and stepwise regression methods are employed to investigate the dependence of the specific capacitance and the rate capability upon the physical properties (such as porosity) of the activated carbon electrode. The specific capacitance of activated carbon electrode is controlled by the micropore volume but independent of the mesopores volume. The rate capability is dominated by the mesopore/micropore volume ratio instead of the absolute value of mesopore volume.

Biomass-derived renewable carbon materials for electrochemical energy storage

“…Those biomass-derived electrode materials often show encouraging electrochemical properties, to a larger extent, comparable to ACs, carbon nanotubes, carbon fibers and graphene. To date, various biomass resources, including all kinds of wood and plant tissues, agricultural wastes, even industrial wastes and municipal wastes have been used as precursor materials to prepare carbon electrodes for supercapacitors, and have gained increasing attention due to their abundant availability and low cost [80,89,90]. The specific surface area, pore size distribution and final electrochemical performance of the obtained carbon materials are determined by their biomass precursors and the adopted activation techniques.…”

Synthesis of 3D porous carbon based on cheap polymers and graphene foam for high-performance electrochemical capacitors

“…This excellent electrochemical performance of the 3D-PGP-1 electrode material was attributed to: (i) The ability of the material to work in both the negative and positive potential window, thus extending the total potential of the fabricated cell; (ii) the unique porous architecture of the 3D-PGP-1 material and (iii) the large accessible surface area, which consists of micropores for trapping the ions and adequate proper-sized mesopores, which enable rapid and reversible ion transport [30]. Although, it is difficult to compare accurately the performance of all types of supercapacitors due to a large number of varying parameters such as material mass loadings and testing configurations, but a rough estimation and comparison show that the results presented in this work are good or even better than those in some previous reports on symmetric carbons devices in aqueous media [26,31].…”

Asymmetric supercapacitor based on nanostructured graphene foam/polyvinyl alcohol/formaldehyde and activated carbon electrodes

“…It is worth stating that the surface of the macropores (>50 nm) makes virtually no contribution to the total capacitance, but act as the ion buffering reservoir, while micropores (<2 nm in size) serve as the ion traps for energy storage, and mesopores (2<50 nm) act as the ion transport pathways for power delivery [35]. Raman spectroscopy has been shown to be a useful tool for the characterization of structural defects in carbon materials [36].…”