Engineering carbon and nitrogen intermingled three dimensional porous cobalt oxide polyhedrons/nanowires for energy storage

Abstract

There is great demand in the development of efficient and economic energy storage devices to address the environmental and exhausting issues of fossil fuel. Supercapacitor, a promising energy storage technology for future generation, demands enormous improvement in its electrode such high specific surface area, high porosity, conductivity and proper architecture. Among various materials, cobalt oxide (Co3O4) has high capacitance but less stability and conductivity. Recently, metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) have been used to enhance the surface area and controllable porosity. However, there is still a challenge to design and synthesize assembly of nanostructure with proper architecture. Here, MOFs-based carbon and nitrogen intermingled highly porous three dimensional (3D) cobalt oxide polyhedrons have been assembled with their nanowires on nickel foam by a combination of hydrothermal, solution, carbonization and calcinations method. Here, MOFs ensured high surface area, high porosity and also contribute carbon and nitrogen required for enhancing conductivity of cobalt