Supercapacitors, well-known as ultra-capacitors or electrochemical capacitors are energy storage devices which contain many advantages such as extremely high-power capability, short charging time, their safety and can operate over a wide temperature range. Electrode materials are the most significant component of supercapacitors which should have high specific surface area (SSA), appropriate pore size and high conductivity. To produce nanoporous carbon as an electrode precursor, polybenzoxazine (PBZ) was chosen because of its molecular design flexibility, resulting in different properties and tunable pore structure. In this work, PBZ-based nanoporous carbon electrode was derived from phenol, formaldehyde and ethylene diamine (EDA) via sol-gel process using dimethylformamide (DMF) as a solvent. In addition, silica nanoparticles were used as hard templates to create mesoporous structure and uniform porosity combined with hexadecyltrimethylammonium bromide (CTAB) and trimethyloctadecylammonium bromide (C<sub>18</sub>TAB) as surfactants which additionally worked as soft templates. The incorporation of silica templates into PBZ organogel structure was successfully characterized and confirmed by FT-IR, TGA and FE-SEM. Moreover, nanoporous carbon electrodes were prepared via pyrolysis and physical activation. In order to compare size of templates, silica nanoparticles with different surfactants were investigated to show the effect of pore size. The highest specific surface area of templated-PBZ derived nanoporous carbon was 850.04 m<sup>2</sup>/g.

Designing nanoporous carbon microstructure for electrode materials in supercapacitors

2019 Spring National Meeting

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