Recently, there has been a growing demand for electrode materials to serve as electrochemical capacitors (EC). It has been an important issue to come up with environment friendly electric power sources to reduce pollution caused by combustion engines of automotive systems. Even though conventional battery systems and fuel cells supply high energy, they lack the high specific power that would be required for hybrid power sources. The ECs can fill the gap between conventional capacitors and batteries. / Carbon nanotubes (CNTs), discovered by Iijima in 1991, attracted great attention in recent years for their unique properties, such as mesoporous character, excellent conductivity, moderate to high specific surface area as well as chemical and mechanical stability. These properties of CNTs make them useful in a wide of range applications including electrode materials for EC applications. / The preparation of CNT electrodes is accomplished by either pasting them onto metallic current collectors with the use of binder materials such as PVDF or growing them from deposited metal nanoparticles on substrates such as graphite paper. The deposition of metal nanoparticles is achieved via sputtering techniques or lengthy electrochemical deposition methods. The aim of this research was to simplify the preparation step by growing CNTs directly on metallic substrates and to study the relationship between surface area and electrochemical capacitance of CNTs. CNTs were produced on metal-alloy grids via chemical vapor deposition (CVD) of acetylene (C2H2). The physical characterization of the samples was achieved by Field Emission Scanning Electron Microscopy (FE-SEM), Raman spectroscopy and Single point BET surface area. The electrochemical performance of the samples was evaluated by cyclic voltammetry (CV) in a three electrode electrochemical cell with 1M sulfuric acid (H2SO4) solution as the electrolyte.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:LACETR/oai:collectionscanada.gc.ca:QMM.112580 |
| Date | January 2007 |
| Creators | Nasuhoglu, Deniz. |
| Publisher | McGill University |
| Source Sets | Library and Archives Canada ETDs Repository / Centre d'archives des thèses électroniques de Bibliothèque et Archives Canada |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Coverage | Master of Engineering (Department of Chemical Engineering.) |
| Rights | All items in eScholarship@McGill are protected by copyright with all rights reserved unless otherwise indicated. |
| Relation | alephsysno: 002713283, proquestno: AAIMR51471, Theses scanned by UMI/ProQuest. |
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