Functionalized Carbon and Its Derivatives Dedicated to Supercapacitors in Industrial Applications

The rise in industrialization in all sectors of day-to-day life has drastically increased the demand for energy consumption, resulted in environmental pollution and depletion of natural fossil fuels. To cope with the energy requirement, the work is going on the usage of efficient alternative renewable resources like solar, hydro, and wind, and the development of existing and new cost-effective advanced nanomaterials for energy storage devices, e.g., supercapacitors. Supercapacitors have a high and quick charge/discharge rate, wide temperature range, long cycle life and are environmental friendly as compared to conventional capacitors. These are widely used in hybrid electric vehicles and smart mobile devices. Environmental pollution has severely affected the health and life of all inhabitants living on the earth. Recently, a lot of work is going on the synthesis of eco-friendly carbon-based materials that can be employed in energy storage with minimum wastage and hazardous by-products. In this context, the economic porous carbon materials with different morphologies have drawn considerable attention of researchers owing to their high chemical and physical stability, and rich pore structure which distinguishes it from traditional carbon materials. The porosity of the carbon skeleton is derived from less organized/amorphous carbonaceous matter during the activation process. It possesses a large specific surface area and its pore size as well as channels can be optimized as per device/application requirements. The physical properties such as surface area and pore size distribution (PSD) directly influence the performance of porous carbons in a particular application/process. This chapter reports the physical and chemical synthesis methods and characterization of activated carbon- and graphene-based porous carbon doped with different organic and inorganic dopants for energy storage supercapacitor application. The future perspective of the work will also be discussed for enhancing the performance of supercapacitor storage capacity. This book chapter elaborates on the importance of the problem with brief historical, and global scenarios with past, present, and future perspectives with proposed solutions/advantages/ disadvantages for energy storage device supercapacitor application.