Abstract
Nitrogen-doped carbon materials derived from N-containing conducting polymer have attracted significant attention due to their special electrochemical properties in the past two decades. Novel nitrogen-enriched carbon nanofibers (NCFs) have been prepared by one-step carbonization of p-toluene sulfonic acid (P-TSA) doped polyaniline (PANI) nanofibers, which are successfully synthesized via the rapid mixing oxidative polymerization at room temperature. NCFs with diameters ranging from 100 nm to 150 nm possess a highly specific surface area of 915 m2 g−1 and a relatively rich nitrogen content of 7.59 at %. Electrochemical measurements demonstrate that NCFs have high specific capacitance (172 F g−1, 2 mV s−1) and satisfactory cycling stability (89% capacitance retention after 5000 cycles). The outstanding properties affirm that NCFs can be promising candidates for supercapacitor electrode materials. Interestingly, the carbonization of PANI opens the possibility to tailor the morphology of resulting nitrogen-enriched carbon materials by controlling the reaction conditions of PANI synthesis.
Highlights
Nitrogen-doped carbon materials have been widely applied to the fuel cell [1], solar cell [2], lithium-ion battery [3], lithium air battery [4], electrocatalysis [5], and adsorption [6,7]
The PANI precursor was synthesized by the rapid mixing polymerization method. 10.0 mL of aniline and 24.0 g ammonium persulfate (APS) were dissolved into 500 mL solution of 0.05 M p-toluene sulfonic acid (P-TSA), respectively
The formation of polyaniline in the chemical oxidation polymerization approach usually consists of three main steps: Chemical reaction, nucleation, and growth [43,44,45,46]
Summary
Nitrogen-doped carbon materials have been widely applied to the fuel cell [1], solar cell [2], lithium-ion battery [3], lithium air battery [4], electrocatalysis [5], and adsorption [6,7].Various nitrogen-doped carbon materials [8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,16,17], such as carbon nanotube [9,10,11,12], porous carbons [13], nanofiber [14], and graphene [15], have been investigated for supercapacitor electrode materials.As we know, electrode material is the key component of electrochemical capacitors and the role of efficient charging of the electrode/electrolyte interface by ions is essential. Based on previous reports [18,19,20,21,22], the nitrogen-containing functional groups can provide a pair of electrons to change the electron donor/acceptor characteristic of carbon materials [8,9,13]. The nitrogen containing functional groups can improve the wettability of carbon material to increase the effective specific surface area for double layer formation and offer extra redox reactions, producing more pseudocapacitance [8,9,10,11,12,13,14]. An appropriate microstructure of carbon-based electrode materials can provide a high electrochemically accessible surface area to improve ionic transportation [16]
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