Fabrication of high-performance supercapacitors using carbon nanoparticles produced with thermal plasma technique

Abstract

The use of porous carbon materials for fabrication of high-performance supercapacitors has attracted significant attention in recent years especially for applications in supercapacitors. In the present work, carbon nanoparticle is successfully fabricated by the home-made thermal plasma system and acetylene gas as the raw materials. To achieve this, a direct current (DC) plasma torch is employed. Also, a cooling chamber is used to create a neutral environment and collect carbon nanoparticles. Further, the structure and morphology of the nanoparticles are examined. Through the proposed procedure, carbon nanoparticles with spherical geometry and size of about 20 nm can be produced. In this approach, nanoparticles are physically activated by steam while the specific surface area reaches 1165 $\mathrm{m}^2 \mathrm{g}^{-1}$ and the average pore diameter is measured at 1.7141 nm. The activated carbon nanoparticles are employed in the production of supercapacitor electrodes showing significantly higher specific capacitances reaching up to 853 $\mathrm{F}$ $\mathrm{g}^{-1}$. Furthermore, this supercapacitor shows a high energy density of 76 $\mathrm{Wh}$ $\mathrm{kg}^{-1}$ at 0.5 $\mathrm{A}$ $\mathrm{g}^{-1}$ with competent cycling performance indicative of its potential suitability for use in electrochemical capacitor production. Therefore, the results of this study verify that activated carbon nanoparticles produced with thermal plasma technique possess suitable properties for supercapacitor production.