The modification of the pore characteristics of activated carbon, for use in electrical double layer capacitors, through plasma processing

TL;DR

This study investigates how plasma processing modifies activated carbon's pore structure to improve electrochemical capacitor performance, achieving up to 35% capacitance increase and 20% resistance decrease with optimal treatment.

Contribution

It demonstrates that plasma processing can enhance activated carbon electrodes' capacitance and resistance, providing a new method to optimize energy storage devices.

Findings

Up to 35% increase in gravimetric capacitance

Approximately 20% decrease in resistance

Capacitance and resistance are sensitive to processing and testing conditions

Abstract

It was aimed to determine whether plasma processing could contribute to enhanced capacitance and energy density of activated carbon electrode based electrochemical capacitors, through the formation of additional surface charges. While an increase of up to 35% of the gravimetric capacitance, along with ~ 20% decrease in resistance, was obtained through optimal plasma processing, increased plasma exposure yielded a drastic reduction (/increase) in the capacitance (/resistance). It was also found that the capacitance and resistance modulation was a sensitive function of sample processing as well as electrochemical testing procedure. Considering the complexity of modeling realistic porous matrices, a metric to parameterize the reach of an electrolyte into the matrix has been posited.