Black Charcoal for Green and Scalable Wooden Electrodes for Supercapabatteries

Abstract

A green, though black, sustainable and low-cost carbon material—charcoal produced from wood—is developed for electricity storage. Charcoal electrodes are fabricated by ball-milling charcoal and adding protein nanofibril binders. The charcoal electrode presents a capacitance of 360 F g−1 and a conductivity of 0.2 S m−1. A pair of redox peaks is observed in the cyclic voltammetry and assigned to originate from quinone groups. Compared with other wooden electrodes, these charcoal electrodes display better cycling stability with 88% capacity retention after 1000 cycles. Their discharge capacity is 2.5 times that of lignosulfonate/graphite hybrid electrodes.