Highly Conductive Ordered Mesoporous Carbon Based Electrodes Decorated by 3D Graphene and 1D Silver Nanowire for Flexible Supercapacitor

TLDR: In this article, ordered mesoporous carbon (OMC) is coated on the surface of highly conductive three-dimensional graphene foam, serving as both charge collector and flexible substrate.

Abstract: Ordered mesoporous carbon (OMC) is considered one of the most promising materials for electric double layer capacitors (EDLC) given its low-cost, high specific surface area, and easily accessed ordered pore channels. However, pristine OMC electrode suffers from poor electrical conductivity and mechanical flexibility, whose specific capacitance and cycling stability is unsatisfactory in flexible devices. In this work, OMC is coated on the surface of highly conductive three-dimensional graphene foam, serving as both charge collector and flexible substrate. Upon further decoration with silver nanowires (Ag NWs), the novel architecture of Ag NWs/3D-graphene foam/OMC (Ag-GF-OMC) exhibits exceptional electrical conductivity (up to 762 S cm−1) and mechanical robustness. The Ag-GF-OMC electrodes in flexible supercapacitors reach a specific capacitance as high as 213 F g−1, a value five-fold higher than that of the pristine OMC electrode. Moreover, these flexible electrodes also exhibit excellent long-term stability with >90% capacitance retention over 10 000 cycles, as well as high energy and power density (4.5 Wh kg−1 and 5040 W kg−1, respectively). This study provides a new procedure to enhance the device performance of OMC based supercapacitors, which is a promising candidate for the application of flexible energy storage devices.