Nitrogen-doped porous carbon monoliths from polyacrylonitrile (PAN) and carbon nanotubes as electrodes for supercapacitors

Nitrogen-doped porous activated carbon monoliths (NDP-ACMs) have long been the most desirable materials for supercapacitors. Unique to the conventional template based Lewis acid/base activation methods, herein, we report on a simple yet practicable novel approach to production of the three-dimension...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Wang, Yanqing, Fugetsu, Bunshi, Wang, Zhipeng, Gong, Wei, Sakata, Ichiro, Morimoto, Shingo, Hashimoto, Yoshio, Endo, Morinobu, Dresselhaus, Mildred, Terrones, Mauricio
Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science
Format: Article
Language:en_US
Published: Nature Publishing Group 2017
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/110079
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8492-2261
Description
Summary:Nitrogen-doped porous activated carbon monoliths (NDP-ACMs) have long been the most desirable materials for supercapacitors. Unique to the conventional template based Lewis acid/base activation methods, herein, we report on a simple yet practicable novel approach to production of the three-dimensional NDP-ACMs (3D-NDP-ACMs). Polyacrylonitrile (PAN) contained carbon nanotubes (CNTs), being pre-dispersed into a tubular level of dispersions, were used as the starting material and the 3D-NDP-ACMs were obtained via a template-free process. First, a continuous mesoporous PAN/CNT based 3D monolith was established by using a template-free temperature-induced phase separation (TTPS). Second, a nitrogen-doped 3D-ACM with a surface area of 613.8 m²/g and a pore volume 0.366 cm³/g was obtained. A typical supercapacitor with our 3D-NDP-ACMs as the functioning electrodes gave a specific capacitance stabilized at 216 F/g even after 3000 cycles, demonstrating the advantageous performance of the PAN/CNT based 3D-NDP-ACMs.