Advances of Carbon Materials for Dual-Carbon Lithium-Ion Capacitors: A Review

Abstract

Lithium-ion capacitors (LICs) have drawn increasing attention, due to their appealing potential for bridging the performance gap between lithium-ion batteries and supercapacitors. Especially, dual-carbon lithium-ion capacitors (DC-LICs) are even more attractive because of the low cost, high conductivity, and tunable nanostructure/surface chemistry/composition, as well as excellent chemical/electrochemical stability of carbon materials. Based on the well-matched capacity and rate between the cathode and anode, DC-LICs show superior electrochemical performances over traditional LICs and are considered to be one of the most promising alternatives to the current energy storage devices. In particular, the mismatch between the cathode and anode could be further suppressed by applying carbon nanomaterials. Although great progresses of DC-LICs have been achieved, a comprehensive review about the advances of electrode materials is still absent. Herein, in this review, the progresses of traditional and nanosized carbons as cathode/anode materials for DC-LICs are systematically summarized, with an emphasis on their synthesis, structure, morphology, and electrochemical performances. Furthermore, an outlook is tentatively presented, aiming to develop advanced DC-LICs for commercial applications.

Nitrogen-Doped Porous Carbon Derived from Coal for High-Performance Dual-Carbon Lithium-Ion Capacitors

“…In particular, the use of carbon-based materials, such as cathode and anode materials simultaneously, to assemble dual-carbon lithium-ion capacitors (DC-LICs) is an emerging means for solving the imbalance of dynamics and capacity. Noting that DC-LICs are assembled with the same material as the anode and cathode electrodes, which can use almost the same material precursors and the same preparation technologies [ 32 , 33 , 34 ], this leads to greatly simplifying the process flow and having great application prospects. For this purpose, some kinds of DC-LICs have been proposed, such as N-doped graphene (NG//NG) [ 35 ], N-doped carbon nanospheres (NCS//NCS) [ 36 ], and B, N-doped carbon nanofibers (BNC//BNC) [ 37 ], etc.…”