Can carbon monoliths be suitable electrodes in supercapacitor cells?

Dr. Francisco del Monte

Group of Bioinspired Materials

Instituto de Ciencia de Materiales de Madrid-ICMM

Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas-CSIC

During the last years, the use of graphene and nanotube-based materials processed in form of thin films or "carbon papers" has proliferated because of the unbeatable performance that these materials exhibited in terms of both energy and power density. However, these results should be taken with caution because the common practice of reporting the energy and power densities per weight of active material rather than per weight of device may give an unrealistic picture in practical terms as recently pointed out by Y. Gogotsi and P. Simon in the "perspective" published in Science 2011, 334, 917. Under these circumstances, we consider that attention should be focus on the development of monolithic porous carbons because of their great potential as electrodes in supercapacitors. The technology based on monoliths is similar to the traditional one using polymeric blends of powdered carbons but it offers certain advantages. In this talk, we will see that carbon monoliths may provide an overall improvement in the neat performance of the electrode coming not only from the lack of non-active components but also from the favoured accessibility to the entire micropore surface. The latter requires the design of synthetic routes allowing a fine tune of pores (larger than micropores) through which the electrolyte will gain access to the electrochemically active micropores.