Self-assembled carbon nanoribbons with the heteroatom doping used as ultrafast charging cathodes in zinc-ion hybrid supercapacitors

Abstract

Zinc-ion hybrid supercapacitors (ZHSs) are highly desirable for large-scale energy storage applications owing to the merits of high safety, low cost and ultra-long cycle life. The poor rate performance of cathodes, however, severely hinders their application. Herein, aqueous ZHSs with superior performance were fabricated by employing a series of ultrathin carbon nanobelts modified with B, N, O (CPTHB-Bx). The heteroatom doping can significantly modify the chemical behaviors of carbon frameworks, which could generate numerous active sites and accelerate the charge transport. The systematic investigation reveals that the B–N groups are active species for fast Zn-ion adsorption and desorption. As a result, the best-performed CPTHB-B2 exhibits an excellent electrochemical performance as cathodes in ZHSs, delivering a high specific capacitance of 415.3 F g−1 at 0.5 A g−1, a record high capacitance retention of 81% when increasing the current densities from 0.5 to 100 A g−1, an outstanding energy density of 131.9 W h kg−1 and an exceptionally high power density of 42.1 kW kg−1. Our work provides a new cathode design for ultrafast charging Zn-ion storage devices.

Hydrothermal Synthesis of Boron-Doped Graphene for High-Performance Zinc-Ion Hybrid Capacitor Using Aloe Vera Gel Electrolyte

“…In this case, the high surface morphological changes in the graphene nanosheets may be caused by the activation of boron doping RGO during long cycles, resulting in good charge-discharge stability for graphene nanosheets. In comparison with the previous reports[28,44,48,49], these results of cycling stability are relatively excellent (see TableS2of the Supplementary Materials). In addition, a comparison study of pure graphene electrodes and B-doped graphene nanosheets was conducted.…”

Coupling Uniform Pore Size And Multi‑Chemisorption Sites: Hierarchically Ordered Porous Carbon For Ultra‐Fast And Large Zinc Ion Storage

“…The outstanding electrochemical property under high quality loading is ascribed to the hierarchically interconnected porous structure of PN-HOPC with short charge/ion diffusion pathways and rapid charge-transfer kinetics. The PN-HOPC ZIC delivers an impressive energy density of 169.5 Wh kg −1 and a power density of 64.0 kW kg −1 , preceding to most of carbon-based ZICs reported [21,29,[35][36][37]39,46] (Figure 3g). More encouragingly, the PN-HOPC ZIC discloses a high capacity of 132.2 mAh g −1 at 10 A g −1 and long-term cycling life with a 99.3% capacity retention over 60 000 charge/discharge cycles (Figure 3h).…”

“…[21] However, it is difficult to control the growth process of carbon materials with confined space, and it is still challenging to synthesize hierarchical porous materials with highly ordered structure. To further enhance Zn 2+ storage capability, the introduction of heteroatoms, such as of boron, [35,36] phosphorus, [24,25] nitrogen, [25,37,38] sulfur [39] and oxygen [12,40] is an effective strategy to provide more redox active sites and increase additional pseudo capacitance by the chemical adsorption/desorption of Zn 2+ . [23] Meanwhile, the heteroatom dopants can change the surface chemical properties and modulate charge storage behavior of carbon cathodes, and thus providing adequate Zn 2+ storage active sites and further optimizing the performance of ZICs.…”

Dodecahedral carbon with hierarchical porous channels and bi-heteroatom modulated interface for high-performance symmetric supercapacitors

“…Apart from the hierarchical porous structures of MOF-derived carbons, it is also an effective method to improve their energy storage performance by introducing ideal heteroatoms (e.g., B [30,31], N [32,33], P [34], S [35], F [36], and O [37]) into the carbon skeletons [38]. In particular, the heteroatoms of B and N show more similar atomic radii and chemical properties to those of C, probably leading to a high content of doped-heteroatom in the carbon lattice.…”