The relevance of conductive additive addition methodology for optimizing the performance of electrodes based on carbon xerogels in aqueous supercapacitors

Abstract

Electrodes for supercapacitors are commercially produced by mixing active material with a conductive additive and a binder. However, with some polymers such as carbon xerogels the conductive additives can be added during their synthesis in order to enhance interactions between the components of the electrode. In this work the performance in aqueous supercapacitors of a carbon xerogel and carbon black or graphene added during and post synthesis is compared. It was observed that, the more integrated the additive is within the carbon xerogel polymeric structure, the greater the differences in the final performance of the hybrid materials, being the sample with graphene oxide added during the synthesis of the organic gel the one with the best performance throughout the whole range of current densities studied.