posted on 2022-02-03, 14:33authored byYinghui Ding, Guocheng Qi, Qian Cui, Jiping Yang, Boming Zhang, Shanyi Du
With
the rapid consumption of fossil fuels and the massive emission
of pollutants, multifunctional materials are the upgrading trend of
automotive and aerospace structures. As a promising structural energy
storage device, the specific capacitance of a carbon-fiber-based structural
supercapacitor is greatly limited as a result of the low specific
surface area of carbon fiber electrodes. In this work, we prepared
high-performance structural supercapacitors that consisted of in situ and ex situ activated carbon (AC)-coated
carbon fiber electrodes, glass fiber separator, and bicontinuous structural
electrolyte. The specific capacitances of the structural supercapacitors
increased from 8.67 × 10–3 to 13.12 F/g after
the coating of AC, while the tensile properties were basically maintained,
which were much higher than the results of the state-of-art performance
for structural supercapacitors. The tensile strength and modulus were
257.78 MPa and 23.20 GPa, respectively, as the mass fraction of AC
increased to 15%. A total of 95% of the capacitance could be maintained
in structural supercapacitor devices with a larger size of 15 ×
15 cm, showing promising engineering prospects of AC-coated structural
supercapacitors. The method in this work provided a facile route for
realizing the large-scale production and engineering application of
high-performance structural supercapacitors.