Improving the Supercapacitor Performance by Dispersing SiO2 Microspheres in Electrodes

This paper describes a simple, reproducible, and scalable procedure for the preparation of a SiO 2 -containing supercapacitor with high cycle stability. A carbon mesoporous material (CMM) with a high specific surface area, CMK-3, was adopted as an electric double-layer capacitor (EDLC) active material for the preparation of electrodes for the supercapacitor. The optimized SiO 2 content decreased as the microsphere diameter decreased, and the optimal specific capacitance was obtained with 6 wt % SiO 2 microspheres (100 nm size). The capacitance improved from 133 to 298 F/g. The corresponding capacitance retention rate after 1000 cycles increased from 68.04 to 91.53%. In addition, the energy density increased from 21.05 to 26.25 Wh/kg with a current density of 1 A/g. Finally, similar results based on active carbon, CeO 2 /CMK-3, and graphene/CNT/MnO v composite electrodes demonstrated that the proposed method exhibits wide compatibility with diverse electrode materials.