High Power- and Energy-Density Supercapacitors through the Chlorine Respiration Mechanism

Supercapacitor represents an important electrical energy storage technology with high-power performance and superior cyclability. However, currently commercialized supercapacitors still suffer limited energy densities. Here we report an unprecedentedly respiring supercapacitor with chlorine gas iteratively re-inspires in porous carbon materials, that improves the energy density by orders of magnitude. Both electrochemical results and theoretical calculations show that porous carbon with pore size around 3 nm delivers the best chlorine evolution and adsorption performance. The respiring supercapacitor with multi-wall carbon nanotube as the cathode and NaTi2(PO4)(3) as the anode can store specific energy of 33 Wh kg(-1) with negligible capacity loss over 30 000 cycles. The energy density can be further improved to 53 Wh kg(-1) by replacing NaTi2(PO4)(3) with zinc anode. Furthermore, thanks to the extraordinary reaction kinetics of chlorine gas, this respiring supercapacitor performs an extremely high-power density of 50 000 W kg(-1).