Activated carbon fiber from liquefied wood and polyvinyl butyral as an additive for production of flexible all-carbon yarn supercapacitors

Abstract

AbstractA novel way to prepare mesoporous activated carbon fibers (ACFs-P) has been developed, while the ACFs-P with high surface area were obtained from liquefied wood by combining polyvinyl butyral (PVB) blending and steam activation. The porosity properties of the new material was investigated by N2adsorption and the Brunauer–Emmett–Teller (BET) surface area was found to be 2710 m2g−1and a pore volume of 1.540 cm3g−1, of which 58.2% was mesoporous with diameters between 3 and 6 nm. ACFs-P had a higher methylene blue (MB) adsorption capacity (962 mg/g) than the PVB-added carbon fibers (CFs-P) and ACFs-P without PVB (ACFs-C). Flexible all-carbon yarn supercapacitors can be produced from ACFs-P as powder or fiber. The fiber approach led to yarn supercapacitors with a less favorable electrochemical performance than the powder based production owing to the poor strength of the fibers. A 10 cm long yarn supercapacitor from the powdered ACFs exhibited a high specific length capacitance of 43 mF cm−1at 2 mV s−1. Yarn supercapacitors showed an excellent mechanical flexibility and its capacitor properties were not diminished after bending or crumpling.