Synthesis of porous NiO nanocrystals with controllable surface area and their application as supercapacitor electrodes

By Xiao-juan Zhang, Wenhui Shi, Jixin Zhu, Weiyun Zhao, Jan Ma, S. Mhaisalkar, Tutino Maria, Yanhui Yang, Hua Zhang, H. Hng and 1 more. 2010

543 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We report a facile way to grow various porous NiO nanostructures including nanoslices, nanoplates, and nanocolumns, which show a structure-dependence in their specific charge capacitances. The formation of controllable porosity is due to the dehydration and re-crystallization of β-Ni(OH)2 nanoplates synthesized by a hydrothermal process. Thermogravimetric analysis shows that the decomposition temperature of the β-Ni(OH)2 nanostructures is related to their morphology. In electrochemical tests, the porous NiO nanostructures show stable cycling performance with retention of specific capacitance over 1000 cycles. Interestingly, the formation of nanocolumns by the stacking of β-Ni(OH)2 nanoslices/plates favors the creation of small pores in the NiO nanocrystals obtained after annealing, and the surface area is over five times larger than that of NiO nanoslices and nanoplates. Consequently, the specific capacitance of the porous NiO nanocolumns (390 F/g) is significantly higher than that of the nanoslices (176 F/g) or nanoplates (285 F/g) at a discharge current of 5 A/g. This approach provides a clear illustration of the process-structure-property relationship in nanocrystal synthesis and potentially offers strategies to enhance the performance of supercapacitor electrodes.

Subfields: Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials, Materials Chemistry, Polymers and Plastics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9ec3cb37a8a9839fd9e0b897098e7ec4e425aa82

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

1. Xiangfeng Duan
2. Xiaoming Sun
3. Cuimei Zhao
4. Weitao Zheng

In Materials Chemistry

1. Xiangfeng Duan
2. D. Evans
3. Junfeng Liu
4. Xiaoming Sun
5. Cuimei Zhao
6. Weitao Zheng
7. T. Lim
8. Z. Dong

Citations in the corpus

• Stable ultrahigh specific capacitance of NiO nanorod arrays (2011, background): “NiO has received great attention as a supercapacitor material due to its high theoretical specific capacitance (2573 F/g), well-defined redox behavior, and low cost [12, 17 ].”
• A Review for Aqueous Electrochemical Supercapacitors (2015, background): “…NiO4/Ni(OH)2 (Song and Gao, 2008; Yuan et al., 2009, Frontiers in Energy Research | www.frontiersin.org May 2015 | Volume 3 | Article 232 2011; Zhang et al., 2010; Cao et al., 2011; Jiang et al., 2011; Xia et al., 2011b; Zhu et al., 2012), MnOx (Ragupathy et al., 2009; Yan et al., 2010a; Wang…”