Micro-meso porous structured carbon nanofibers with ultra-high surface area and large supercapacitor electrode capacitance

By He Wang, Haitao Niu, Hongjie Wang, Wenyu Wang, X. Jin, Hongxia Wang, Hua Zhou, Tong Lin. 2021

184 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Carbon nanofibers from electrospun polymer nanofibers have received considerable attention. However, most of the carbon nanofibers with a surface area above 1000 m2/g were reported to have a supercapacitor electrode capacitance far below 350 F g−1. Herein, we report a novel carbon nanofibrous material that has a supercapacitor electrode capacitance as high as 394 F g−1 (1.0 A g−1). We used a polymer blend of polyacrylonitrile (PAN) and novolac (NOC) as materials, to electrospin them into precursor nanofibers and subsequently carbonize the nanofibers into carbon nanofibers. The carbon nanofibers prepared had a specific surface area as high as 1468 m2 g−1 with a meso-micro pores (average pore size 2.2 nm) predominated porous structure. The carbon nanofiber electrodes after 10,000 cycles of charging and discharging at 1.0 A g−1 maintained the capacitance almost unchanged. At the optimal condition, the supercapacitor device made of the electrodes had an energy density as high as 13.6 Wh∙kg−1 (at 0.5 kW kg−1). The high capacitance value comes from the carbon nanofibers with a large surface area and a unique porous structure. The high inter-fiber interconnection contributes to high capacitance. This super-high surface area carbon may be useful for the development of high-performance supercapacitors and other energy devices.

Subfields: Biomaterials, Biomedical Engineering, Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1418b749c47c642597077a4cf173be584fa11e39