Enhancing carbon based supercapacitor performance through redox additive based gel polymer electrolyte

Abstract

The work described in the thesis has been done with a motive to synthesize gel polymer electrolytes which act as self-separators and their application in the fabrication of EDLC based supercapacitor. The use of plasticizers and Ionic Liquids is described in the literature review and the synthesis process describes how the redox additive based supercapacitor are synthesized. The Gel Polymer Electrolyte (GPE) based EDLC devices fabricated with standard activated carbo electrodes show a significant enhancement of specific capacitance of the supercapacitor fabricated. We have used the measurements from Cyclic Voltammetry (CV) Galvanostatic Charge Discharge (GCD) and Electrochemical Impedance Spectroscopy (EIS) to reach an optimization of the specific capacitance value. The different weight percentage of redox additives that we have used gave us a promising result. The physiochemical properties of the electrolyte is studied such as cation size and their effects on the electrochemical performance thus we try to establish a co-relation between the electrochemical performance of EDLC and the physiochemical property of Ionic Liquid. We obtain the values of Specific Capacitance from Galvanostatic Charge Discharge Method as 126 F g-1 for GPE with CsI additive and 87.8 F g-1 for GPE having no redox additive showcasing an enhancement. Its Power and Energy density were also calculated