Carbon materials for supercapacitor application

The most commonly used electrode materials for electrochemical capacitors are activated carbons, because they are commercially available and cheap, and they can be produced with large specific surface area. However, only the electrochemically available surface area is useful for charging the electrical double layer (EDL). The EDL formation is especially efficient in carbon pores of size below 1 nm because of the lack of space charge and a good attraction of ions along the pore walls. The pore size should ideally match the size of the ions. However, for good dynamic charge propagation, some small mesopores are useful. An asymmetric configuration, where the positive and negative electrodes are constructed from…