Preparation Of Carbon Aerogel And Its Application In Supercapacitor

Organic aerogels and carbon aerogels, which were developed at the end of 1980s, are novel, low-density, non-crystalline, porous, nanometer carbon materials, whose structure and properties can be controlled at nanometer scale. They have many different properties comparing with inorganic aerogels in physiological compatibility, biodegradability and carbon aerogels' electric conductivity. These materials have been found potential applications in high-energy physics, medicine, acoustics, thermodynamics, catalysis and electrics. Although organic aerogels and carbon aerogels obtained a great deal of interest, their application was limited due to the high cost and long preparation period. In this work, we have developed a new technical process to prepare carbon aerogels by employing new raw materials, and the effects of some parameters on structures of organic aerogel and carbon aerogel were investigated. The microstructures of carbon aerogels was characterized by means of low-temperature N₂ adsorption, TG, SEM and IR etc.In the present study, resorcinol and formaldehyde were used as starting materials catalyzed by Na₂CO₃ in sol-gel polymerization process to prepare RF aquagels. After solvent exchanged and dried at ambient pressure, the wine, monolithic RF organic aerogels obtained were pyrolyzed at high temperature to obtain monolithic RF carbon aerogels. During preparation, the properties of organic aerogel are mainly affected by concentration of starting material and catalyst. With decreasing the concentration of catalyst, the density and specific surface area of aerogels decrease, pore size distribution becomes width. The structure of aerogels could be modified by adding ethanol to the starting material; with the increase of mass of ethanol, the specific area and micropore surface area decreased, mesopore surface area increased and pore size became smaller. The texture properties of carbon aerogels can be modified by CO₂ activation. A sample prepared at concentration of starting materials and catalyst S=40%, R/Cat=500 (denoted as RF40/500) was activated at 850℃ with different activation times and the highest specific surface area can be gotten after 3 h activation,.In this work, we used cresol and formaldehyde as starting material, catalyzed by NaOH through sol-gel process and drying at ambient pressure to prepare organic aerogels and followed by carbonization to get carbon aerogels. The obtained samples have high specific sueface area, and are typical mesopore materials. We also studied the effects of CO2 activated at different temperature and time for the sample prepared at W/Am=10, Cm/Cat=60 (denoted as CmF10/60). With increase of the activated temperature, the effect of CO₂ activated became...