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Hetero-Atom Doped Highly Conductive Porous Carbon for Exceptional Electrochemical Performance

Wednesday, 16 May 2018: 14:10
Room 607 (Washington State Convention Center)
S. R. Mangisetti, S. Ramaprabhu, and K. M (Indian Institute of Technology Madras)
In response to the growing global energy needs, the dependency on fossil fuels can lead to the harsh effects on the environment. Thus, it is crucial to recognize continuously growing energy demand by expanding the energy conversion and storage technologies, which exploit clean and renewable energy resources. In this concern, the progress of new energy conversion and storage devices are detected as one of the most important topics in clean energy applications. To efficiently use the produced energy in automobiles, portable applications, it must be stored absolutely so that it can be reproduced when required. Supercapacitors are new class of energy storage devices, in which carbon nanomaterials with controlled porous structure and unique physicochemical properties are among the crucial components. Supercapacitors have the benefit of rapid recharge ability, greater stability, and long cycle life. However, further enhancement of the electrochemical performance, particularly improving the energy density, is a quite challenging. To deal this difficulty, several approaches such as the utilization of carbon materials with high active surface area and studies in various non-aqueous electrolytes also have been attempted. Further, electrochemically energetic materials such as conducting polymers have been developed to enhance the specific capacitance. But they found limited practical applications due to the deterioration of the rate capability and cycle stability. Hetero-atom doping is another productive approach to modify the properties of the carbon nanomaterials and their electrochemical performance. Conductive polymers specifically, polypyrrole is ideal precursor for preparation of hetero-atom doped carbon nanomaterials. However, there is a demand to develop highly conductive porous carbon nanomaterials with high active surface area and hetero-atom doping using a simple method. Here, we present a simple yet productive method for synthesizing hetero-atom doped highly conductive porous carbon with high specific surface area and unique hierarchical pore structure. We prepared the large-scale synthesis of nitrogen-doped porous carbon wrapped reduced graphene oxide-partially exfoliated carbon nanotubes (NP-(rGO-PECNT)) with interconnected hierarchical porous structure. Here, the polypyrrole conductive polymer acts as both nitrogen and carbon source, thereby contributing to pseudocapacitance while, rGO-PECNT conductive matrix provides a high specific surface area for ion and charge transportation. The derived porous (NP-(rGO-PECNT)) displays 7 at % nitrogen content with a specific surface area 2400 m2 g-1, and pore volume 1.81 cm3 g-1. The fabricated supercapacitor using (NP-(rGO-PECNT)) as an electrode material exhibits excellent specific capacitance of 800 F g-1 at 2 A g-1, with high cycling stability of 96 % over 10000 cycles.