Projects per year
Abstract
Upcycling Covid19 plastic waste into valuable carbonaceous materials for energy storage applications is a sustainable and green approach to minimize the burden of waste plastic on the environment. Herein, we developed a facile single step activation technique for producing activated carbon consisting of spherical flower like carbon nanosheets and amorphous porous flakes from used PET [poly (ethylene terephthalate)] face shields for supercapacitor applications. The as-obtained activated carbon exhibited high specific surface area of 1571 m2 g1 and pore volume of 1.64 cm3 g1. The specific capacitance of these carbon nanostructures coated stainless steel electrodes reached 228.2 F g1 at 1 A g1 current density with excellent charge transport features and good rate capability in 1 M Na2SO4 aqueous electrolyte. We explored slot-die coating technique for large-area coatings of flexible high-performance activated carbon electrodes with special emphasis on optimizing binder concentration. Significant improvement in electrochemical performance was achieved for the electrodes with 15 wt% Nafion concentration. The flexible supercapacitors fabricated using these electrodes showed high energy and power density of 21.8 Wh Kg1 and 20600 W kg1 respectively, and retained 96.2% of the initial capacitance after 10000 cycles at 2 A g1 current density. The present study thus provides a promising sustainable approach for upcycling PET plastic waste for large area printable supercapacitors.
Original language | English |
---|---|
Number of pages | 15 |
Journal | RSC Advances |
Publication status | Accepted/In press - 27 Dec 2022 |
Keywords
- scalable slot-die coated flexible supercapacitors
- supercapacitors
- upcycling
- PET face shields
Fingerprint
Dive into the research topics of 'Scalable slot-die coated flexible supercapacitors from upcycled PET face shields'. Together they form a unique fingerprint.Projects
- 1 Active
-
Highly Efficient Elastic Perovskite Solar Cells
EPSRC (Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council)
1/09/17 → 30/11/23
Project: Research Fellowship