ON THE (PSEUDO) CAPACITIVE PERFORMANCE OF JACK FRUIT SEED CARBON

Palanichamy Kalyani, Ariharaputhiran Anitha

Abstract: Today, the idea of utilizing biomass from agricultural wastes as a raw material for producing (activated) carbons has attracted the interest of researchers worldwide for the obvious multifarious applications of carbon. As a novel attempt, carbon has been derived from a domestic biomass waste viz., the jack fruit seeds (Artocarpus heterophyllus) and tested its prospects as electrodes in energy storage devices namely electrochemical capacitors. Jack Fruit Seed Carbon (JFSC) is produced by simply pyrolyzing JFS under N2 atmosphere without making use of any activating agents. Capacitive behavior in 1M H2SO4 & 1M Na2SO4 electrolytes are evaluated by impedance spectroscopy, cyclic voltammetry and galvanostatic charge-discharge studies. N2 sorption studies evince the presence of microporous nature of the JFSC. Cyclic voltammetry estimates specific capacitance as high as 316 and 203 Fg-1 respectively in H2SO4 and Na2SO4 at a scan rate of 10mVs-1 . JFSC show excellent electrochemical cycle stability in 1M H2SO4 with 93% of the initial capacitance being retained at the end of 500th cycles. The studies infer that JFSC has immense potential as an electrode material in electrochemical capacitors while its performance largely depends upon physical features, surface functional groups or the hetero atoms contributing pseudocapacitive nature to the JFSC. Thus the work not only describes a waste utilization scheme but also presents a new and valuable dimension to the usefulness of jack fruit seeds in electrochemical capacitors

Keywords: Electrochemical capacitors; Pseudocapacitors, Biomass Carbon electrode and Jack Fruit seeds

DOI: https://doi.org/10.15623/ijret.2014.0309036