Abstract
Growing environmental concerns have spurred investments in intermittent renewable energies and electric vehicles. The parallel boom in portable consumer electronics has placed considerable stress on electrochemical energy storage, creating environmental and availability issues for key inorganic materials. The need to switch to bio-sourced, widely available, organic materials is confronted by the low conductivity and stability of most candidates and the difficulties of creating an efficient, metal-free current collector. In this work, we present an acidic thermal oxidative treatment utilizing carbon paper as an efficient electrode for biosourced organic molecules. Following deposition of bio-sourced materials sepia melanin and catechin (a tannin) with high specific capacitance and energy density showed very promising results for supercapacitors. Up to 228 F/g capacitance, with 100% retention after 5 000 cycles, 100% coulombic efficiency, 69.71, 81.25 W h/kg and 22.20 and 12.66 kW/kg energy and power densities for sepia melanin and catechin, respectively, were achieved for symmetric supercapacitor devices.
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