Hybrid nanowires and nanoparticles of WO₃ in a carbon aerogel for supercapacitor applications

Abstract

In the field of electrochemical energy storage, incorporation of metal oxides into porous carbon has attracted significant attention. Since each advantage of nanoparticles and nanowires of metal oxide has been distinguished for supercapacitor applications, a combination of the advantages of both structures together can meet a capacitive synergy. In this study, WO nanowires and nanoparticles were first incorporated into a carbon aerogel (CA) simultaneously via a facile and one-pot route. A comparative study on the capacitive properties of this novel hybrid structure and single nanoparticles in CA was conducted. The introduction of WO nanowires with diameter <40 nm provided an additional pair of redox peaks and improved the specific capacitance by 50% and the rate capacity by 61%. The composite within the hybrid nanowires and nanoparticles exhibits an excellent cycling stability of only 2% decay in specific capacitance detected at 50 mV s for 1000 cycles. The individual contribution of nanowires and nanoparticles to the enhanced capacitance has been discussed, and the enhanced capacitive properties can be ascribed to the hybrid structure better for charge transport during the electrochemical process. More importantly, this route can be extended to incorporate nanowires of other metal oxides into mesoporous carbon, and enhanced capacitive properties can be expected.

Colloidal Synthesis of NbS2 Nanosheets: From Large-Area Ultrathin Nanosheets to Hierarchical Structures

“…The EIS test was carried out to understand the internal resistance of the various NbS 2 electrodes and interactions of the electrode/electrolyte interface. As shown in Figure 5E, the Nyquist plots displayed semicircles in the high frequency region, relating to charge transfer resistance (R ct ) (Liu et al, 2018b). The R ct value of the hierarchical NbS 2 electrode was smaller than the ultrathin one, reflecting the easier process of charge transfer, which was coherent with the results that the specific capacitance of the former electrode was higher than the latter one in low current densities ( Figure 5D).…”

Nitrogen-Doped Multi-Scale Porous Carbon for High Voltage Aqueous Supercapacitors

“…However, due to the intermittent nature of these energy sources, batteries will be charged repeatedly which resulted in rapid decay of their cycle life. In this case, supercapacitors (SCs) with favorable features of long cycling stability, fast charging/discharging ability and high power density are generally more suitable than batteries (Jia et al, 2018 ; Liu et al, 2018b ; Qu et al, 2018 ). Specifically, since the SCs have high specific power characteristic, it also have been widely used in a wide variety of applications such as portable electronics, electric or hybrid electric vehicles, aircraft and smart grids.…”

Fabrication and Electrochemical Performance of Al-Doped ZnO Nanosheets on Graphene-Based Flexible Substrates

“…The properties of SCs are closely related to the electrode materials used, and examples of materials used in current research are: carbon materials (Salinas-Torres et al, 2019), metal oxides (Wu et al, 2018) and conductive polymers. Of all electrode materials, carbon materials with high specific surface area and low internal resistance receive more attention, including activated carbon fibers (Ren et al, 2013), carbon aerogel (Liu et al, 2018), carbon nanotubes (Futaba et al, 2006), activated carbon Isabel et al, 2016), porous carbon (Yang et al, 2019), and graphene (Zhang et al, 2016;Ren et al, 2018).…”