Environmentally Friendly Functionalization of Porous Carbon Electrodes for Aqueous-Based Electrochemical Capacitors

A green chemical method is reported for the synthesis and functionalization of high surface area carbon-based materials for applications as electrodes in short-term energy storage devices, such as supercapacitors. The proposed method is focused on sustainable chemistry and engineering. Our results evidenced an excellent performance of electrochemical capacitor devices with a high lifespan over a wide working voltage with low equivalent series resistance. Great enhancement of electrode wettability and charge transfer at the electrode/electrolyte interface using oxygenated surface functional groups was obtained using the present method. Actually, the present findings are quite promising thus encouraging further investigations of this green-functionalization method for all other carbon-based materials, such as graphene, carbon nanotubes, doped-diamond, and so on.