Abstract
Recycling hazardous wastes to produce value-added products is becoming essential for the sustainable progress of our society. Herein, highly porous carbon (1625 m2/g) is synthesized using waste tires as the precursor and used as supercapacitor electrode. The narrow pore size distribution (PSD) and high surface area led to a good charge storage capacity, especially when used as a three-dimensional nanoscaffold to polymerize polyaniline (PANI/TC). The composite film was highly flexible, conductive and exhibited a capacitance of 480 F/g at 1 mV/s with excellent capacitance retention up to 98% after 10,000 charge/discharge cycles. The high capacitance and long cycle life were ascribed to the short diffusional paths, uniform PANI coating and tight confinement of the PANI in the inner pores of the tire-derived carbon via π-π interactions, which minimized the degradation of the PANI upon cycling. We anticipate that the same strategy can be applied to deposit other pseudocapacitive materials with low-cost TC to achieve even higher electrochemical performance and longer cycle life, a key challenge for redox active polymers.
