POROUS CARBON FROM PINEAPPLE PEEL AS ELECTRODE MATERIAL OF SUPERCAPACITOR

Abstract

Porous carbon from biomass has a great potential to be developed. Biomass as a resource is renewable, abundantly available, and cheap. One application of porous carbon is as an electrode material of supercapacitor due to its advantageous pore properties such as high specific surface area and pore volume. This research prepared porous carbon material from pineapple peel waste and tested it as a supercapacitor electrode. The research steps were material preparation, conversion of pineapple peel to porous carbon, and characterization, including material characterization and electrochemical characterizations. Pineapple peel (under 80 mesh size) was pre-carbonized by hydrothermal method at 190⁰C for 2 hours under a subcritical condition. After that, biochar was pyrolyzed at 900⁰C and activated using CO₂/N₂ (KB-900-50). As a reference, biochar was also pyrolyzed under a nitrogen atmosphere at 900⁰C without activation (KB-900). Produced porous carbon was characterized (i) pore structures, e.g., specific surface area, average pore diameter, and total pore volume using N₂-sorption analysis, and (ii) electrochemical performance, e.g., cyclic voltammetry and galvanostatic method using 1 M H₂SO₄ electrolyte solution. The result showed that the activation process effectively increased the porosity of porous carbon. Material (KB-900-50) possesses a high surface area of 648 m²/g and a high capacitance value of 78 F/g.