Analysis of electrochemical parameters for activated carbon supercapacitor

Abstract

This project investigates the correlation between the cyclic voltammetry (CV), galvanostatic charge-discharge (GCD), and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) tests, which are the most common tests done to evaluate the performance of supercapacitor. The main contribution of this work is to study the characteristic of those tests, as well as knowing the relevance of using activated carbon (AC) electrode for the supercapacitor, when abundance of electrode options is also available in the market. This is achieved by comparing the electrochemical performance of the fabricated supercapacitor with the other material's performances found in literature. To validate the findings, AC supercapacitor is constructed, which starts with creating AC electrode from commercially available AC powder. Cellulose paper, which used as the separator is sandwiched between two electrodes, before sealed inside the twoelectrode test cell together with 1M H2SO4 solution as the electrolyte. The fabricated AC supercapacitor is then tested with the three tests stated before using Gamry Interface 1000. It is found that the CV test gives out the highest specific capacitance value while the EIS test gives out the lowest equivalent series resistance value. When compared with other materials, the performance of AC supercapacitor trails behind other novel material like metal-oxide supercapacitor. It is envisaged that this findings can be useful when choosing supercapacitor types for any application.