Alam Mahdi, Mirbagheri Seyed Ahmad, Ghaani Mohammad Reza
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, K.N. Toosi University of Technology, No. 1346, Vali Asr Street, Mirdamad Intersection, Tehran, Iran.
School of Chemical and Bioprocess Engineering, University College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin 4, Ireland.
Heliyon. 2019 Feb 15;5(2):e01196. doi: 10.1016/j.heliyon.2019.e01196. eCollection 2019 Feb.
Carbon Xerogel is an economic choice of material for electrodes with applications in Electric Double Layer Capacitors (EDLCs) and Capacitive DeIonization systems (CDI, particularly for desalination). The objective here is to optimize Carbon Xerogel's performance, specifically its capacitance, through multi-parameter optimization using Response Surface Methodology (RSM). We choose NaOH as the catalyst and select as the optimization parameters (i) the pH of the initial Resorcinol-Formaldehyde-Catalyst (RFC) solution, (ii) Reactants to Liquid mass ratio (R/L) of the RFC solution, and (iii) the Pyrolysis Temperature (PT). For a selected range of these three parameters, we obtain an optimum capacitance of Carbon Xerogel equal to 37.6 F/g with optimized parameters PT = 800, R/L = 30% and pH = 5.7. Through comparing Carbon Xerogel samples synthesized with NaCO versus NaOH as the catalyst, we show that the capacitance not only depends on the pH of the initial RFC solution, but also is a strong function of the catalyst material.
炭气凝胶是一种经济的电极材料，可应用于双电层电容器（EDLC）和电容去离子系统（CDI，特别是用于海水淡化）。这里的目标是通过使用响应面法（RSM）进行多参数优化，来优化炭气凝胶的性能，特别是其电容。我们选择氢氧化钠作为催化剂，并选择（i）初始间苯二酚-甲醛-催化剂（RFC）溶液的pH值、（ii）RFC溶液的反应物与液体质量比（R/L）以及（iii）热解温度（PT）作为优化参数。对于这三个参数的选定范围，我们获得了炭气凝胶的最佳电容，等于37.6 F/g，优化参数为PT = 800、R/L = 30%和pH = 5.7。通过比较以碳酸钠与氢氧化钠作为催化剂合成的炭气凝胶样品，我们表明电容不仅取决于初始RFC溶液的pH值，而且还是催化剂材料的强函数。
