Structural control of zeolite-templated carbon and its application to electrochemical energy storage

Abstract

In this thesis, zeolite-templated carbon (ZTC), which is a high-surface microporous carbon, is chosen as a starting material and its structural control to achieve high performance electrochemical capacitors (ECs) is investigated. ZTC is synthesized as a negative replica of zeolite Y template, and has an interesting carbon framework, i.e. buckybowl-like framework structure, containing a lot of edge sites. Two different approaches were examined on the structure modification of ZTC to realize a high-performance electrode material for ECs. The first approach, decreasing the edge sites of ZTC, was found not to be effective way. However, the resulting material, i.e., crosslinked-fullerene-like framework structure, is a new class of sp²-carbon based material, which is expected to future researches. The second approach, utilization of the large amount of reactive edge site, was revealed to be an interesting way to enhance the capacitance from a contribution of electrochemically-introduced functional group.