Study of preparation and electrochemical capacitance performance of pyrolytic carbon through synchronously synthetical template method

A new synchronously synthetical template method (SSTM) was brought forward to prepare carbon materials possessing controllable pore structure by mixing two sol-gel reactions, TEOS and resorcinol-formaldehyde in this paper. To testify the function of silica template to the formation of the pore structure of SSTM carbon, RF carbon by the pyrolysis of resorcinol-formaldehyde xerogel was also produced. N-2 sorption at 77K investigation showed that specific surface and average pore size of SSTM carbon were 1100m(2) . g(-1) and 4. 5nm respectively, and its pore size distribution was very concentrative. The special structure of SSTM carbon was attributed to the simultaneous formation of template material (silica aquagel) and carbon precursor (resorcinol-formaldehyde aquagel). Voltage sweep cyclic voltametry was applied to investigate the electrochemical capacitance performance of SSTM carbon and T82 active carbon(1720m(2) . g(-1)) parallel. SSTM carbon exhibited more excellent electrochemical capacitance performance, 195F . g(-1) at 2mV . s(-1), than that of T82 carbon, 150F . g(-1) at the same scan rate, although the specific surface of T82 carbon was much larger than that of SSTM carbon. Furthermore, the former exhibited better high current charge/discharge performance than the latter. Different characteristics of pore structures of the two carbons resulted in the difference of their electrochemical capacitance performance.