Highly conductive carbon for applications in supercapacitors or batteries

Abstract

Supercapacitors are new king of energy storage devices which have high efficiency and outstanding properties such as high power density and long life cycle. In order to reach high capacitance, choosing the electrode material very important. Carbon material is a great choice due to suitable properties for using as supercapacitor electrodes such as high electrical conductivity, flexible on morphology design, and low cost. Generally for high conductive carbon, graphene is a powerful candidate, but it has some drawbacks which are high cost due to limited availability and difficult to process. Synthesis of graphene-like carbon is therefore interested, in order to use as an alternative conductive material. In this study, sol-gel process was used to synthesize polybenzoxazine precursor, in which Cetyltrimethyl ammonium bromide (CTAB) was used as a soft template to produce amorphous carbon with high electrical conductivity. The chemical structure of polybenzoxazine was examined by FT-IR and TGA was used to investigate the thermal properties. In addition, the effect of pyrolysis temperature was investigated. The results showed that pyrolysis at 1000 ℃ provided the highest conductivity around 9800 S/cm because the structure of the resulting carbon changed to more ordered which observed from XRD pattern and Raman spectra. The electrical property of carbon xerogels were examined at room temperature by an electrometer with two-point probe.