Review of carbon-based electrode materials for supercapacitor energy storage

In today’s nanoscale regime, energy storage is becoming the primary focus for majority of the world’s and scientific community power. Supercapacitor exhibiting high power density has emerged out as the most promising potential for facilitating the major developments in energy storage. In recent years, the advent of different organic and inorganic nanostructured materials like nano carbons, metal oxides, nanosheets of graphene, and conducting polymers has enabled high-performance-fabricated devices. A review of different carbon-based materials used in the fabrication of electrodes for electrochemical capacitors is presented in this paper. Along with materials used, a brief overview of different types of supercapacitors depending on charge storage mechanism is also been discussed. Materials summary including applications have been provided through the exhaustive analysis of the literature. Keeping nano-architecture electrodes in view, a summary of different technologies considering the integration of metal oxide into carbon nanofibers, carbon fiber papers, graphene/reduced graphene oxide, and SWCNTs/MWCNTS has been presented in this work. The specific capacitance in the range of 40–300 F/g had been reported in the literature for the EDLC (electric double-layer capacitors) supercapacitors. In contrast to this, carbon nanomaterials-based metal-oxides supercapacitors (CNMO-SC) have emerged as the new promising candidate which possess large specific capacitance (> 100 F/g), high energy density, and cost effectiveness. Hence, a review of certain types of carbon nanomaterials has also been reported here.