Nature inspired approach to mimic design for increased specific capacitance as supercapacitor electrodes

Abstract

In this study, the experiment was conducted assuming that the citrus fruits were contaminated with bacteria. Herein, orange peels (OP) and lemon peels (LP) can be used as a carbon source and have the advantage of using discarded materials and heteroatoms. Also, the nitrogen heteroatom is introduced by naturally doping the materials with bacteria (Escherichia Coli, E. coli). The as-prepared bacteria doped activated carbon showed an increase in nitrogen content and surface properties which led to an improvement in electrochemical properties. The specific capacitance of bacteria doped OP and LP was 92.4 and 139 Fg^-1 compared to the bare samples with a specific capacitance of 60.9 and 49.6 Fg^-1 at a current density of 0.2Ag^-1 and capacity retention of 129% after 10,000 cycles for the bacteria-doped samples. This process which is simple, cheap, and environmentally friendly can be applied to discarded fruit peels for the fabrication of supercapacitor materials.

Keywords: Activated carbon; Bacteria; Citrus fruit peel; Heteroatoms; Pseudocapacitance.