Organic-Carbon Composites for Next Generation Capacitive Electrodes

The usage and consumption of fossil fuels have caused large amounts of greenhouse gases to be released leading to accelerated global warming and climate change. To mitigate these issues, we proposed a solution to develop novel, sustainable materials to enable long-lasting energy storage and conversion. One family of these materials are composed of organic-carbon redox-active composites, which display high performance and high-power density when used as electrodes in electrochemical capacitors (EC). These redox active organic-carbon composites can be produced using bottom-up or top-down approaches with tunable morphologies and architectures using sustainable active materials not requiring extensive mining. In addition to the current common conducting polymers, there are many other promising redox active materials including small molecules, macrocycles, and covalent organic frameworks, etc. In this chapter, the following key perspectives are discussed; established and emerging redox active species, carbonaceous materials, fabrication methodologies, structural characterization, and electrochemistry of promising composite electrodes. The future directions are discussed with a focus on the fundamental understanding of composite components and interactions, and improvement of materials design and evaluation with an emphasis in the EC fields.