Novel Lignin-Cellulose-Based Carbon Nanofibers as High-Performance Supercapacitors

• Published in: ACS applied materials & interfaces Vol. 12; no. 1; pp. 1210 - 1221
• Main Authors: Cao, Qiping, Zhu, Mengni, Chen, Jiaai, Song, Yueyan, Li, Yao, Zhou, Jinghui
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: United States American Chemical Society 08.01.2020
• Subjects: carbon fibers; lignin; thermal stability; bio-renewable; supercapacitor
• ISSN: 1944-8244; 1944-8252
• DOI: 10.1021/acsami.9b14727

In this work, a simple phosphating process was proposed to modify cellulose-acetate (CA) and lignin for a novel energy storage precursor material. The prepared precursor fibers exhibited good thermal stability of lignin and flexibility of CA. Subsequently, the precursor fibers undergo a short preoxidation and carbonization treatment process to obtain the biomass-based carbon fibers (CFs) with complete fibrous morphology, uniform fiber diameter, high surface areas, good flexibility, and excellent power storage capacity. The specific capacitance of 346.6 F/g was obtained by using CFs-5 (prepared with 40% H3PO4 content) as a supercapacitor. Simultaneously, the biomass-based CF supercapacitor device delivers a high-energy density of 31.5 Wh/kg at the power density of 400 W/kg. These results indicate that the introduction of H3PO4 can effectively reduce the energy consumption of the preoxidation treatment process for the preparation of the biomass-based CFs, while increasing the energy storage properties significantly. This novel strategy showed a successful route for the preparation of high-quality and low-consumption biomass-based CFs.