Ultrafast Nonvolatile Ionic Liquids-Based Supercapacitors with Al Foam-Enhanced Carbon Electrode

The ultrafast frequency response supercapacitor is a promising candidate for alternating current line filtering. We report the fabrication of a special structured ionic liquid-based supercapacitor with an ultrafast response of only 1.5 ms. The three-dimensional aluminum (Al) foam in situ coated with carbon layer (∼500 nm) serves as the novel, highly efficient electrode-current collector. The high porosity (95%) of Al foam allows the rapid ion diffusion and the as-obtained Al/C interface with atomic-level mixing allows the fast electron transfer, two crucial factors for ultrafast response. Hence, it possesses an excellent specific mass capacitance of 68 mF g–1 at 120 Hz, as well as an ultrahigh rate of up to 3000 V s –1. The supercapacitors exhibit frequency modulation performance in the range of 20 kHz to 16 MHz. They exhibit the similar even better alternating current filtering performance, as compared to the commercial aluminum electrolytic capacitors, detected at 10 Hz, 60 Hz, 100 Hz and 1 M Hz. These results suggest that, although ILs have high viscosity and low ion mobility, the IL-based supercapacitor has a great potential to be used as a device for alternating current line filtering, as well as providing nonvolatile and nonflammability safety.