In-situ self-assembly host-guest carbon aerogels for rboust electrochemical capacitors

Abstract As a type of promising candidates for electric double-layer capacitors (EDLCs) electrodes, carbon aerogels should possess large surface area, hierarchical porous structures and abundant surface groups. However, ordinary carbon aerogels derived from their aerogel precursors with a single component will not have the possibility to fit some key requirements for energy storage as expected, one of which is mainly generated by the damage of the original structures of the aerogel precursors during preparation processes (like drying, calcining, etc). In this work, polyacrylamide and polyaniline as the two component precursors of host-guest structure carbon aerogels, and such in-suit combination strategy let as-prepared hybrid gels have continuously interconnected porous structures and cross-linked mutual-supported networks so as to form more stable skeleton for resisting the damage of their precursor original structures during preparation processes. After the carbonization and activation treatment, the resulted host-guest carbon areogel exhibits high BET surface area of 2805.07 m2 g−1 and huge pore volume of 1.46 cm3 g−1, which is almost the sum of the host-carbon aerogel with the single component of polyacrylamide and the guest-carbon aerogel with the single component of polyaniline. When they are assembled as electrodes in a symmetric capacitor device, the host-guest carbon aerogels present high specific capacitance of 523 F g−1 (1 A g−1) and long term charge-discharge stability over 10,000 cycles.