Nanocarbons as electrode materials for supercapacitors

Electrochemical double layer capacitors (supercapacitors) are expected to play a significant role in future hybrid power systems due to their high specific power, cycle life, and tolerance of extreme environmental conditions. The development of flexible, conformable energy storage devices is also of great interest due to ease of packaging and coupling with flexible electronics. Because supercapacitors store charge only on the electrode surfaces, maximizing the amount of surface area that is accessible to the electrolyte ions is of critical importance. Carbon is an excellent electrode material due to a variety of favourable chemical properties, including chemical stability and large electrochemical windows and thus currently the most common electrode material is activated carbon. Currently however, the nanocarbons, as a new class of materials, offer properties and potential to be implemented in electrodes of energy storage devices resulting in an overall improvement of system performance. Among those novel materials one can consider carbon nanotubes, carbon nanohorns and graphene and its derivatives. In this talk the potential of nanomaterials will be presented and supported by the results of EU funded ElectroGraph project (Graphene-based electrodes for application in supercapacitors). This project follows an integrated technology driven approach where the research and development activities stretch out from the material synthesis, through properties engineering and processing of grapheme materials towards their applicability as electrode for energy storage. Together with the technological development, the experience based understanding of appropriate practices for the safe production, processing and recycling of graphene nanomaterials is being generated, and will facilitate the development of guidance on risk management and best available techniques to minimize and control any health risks to manufacturers, downstream users and the environment.