Modified Activated Carbon on Electric Double Layer Capacitor Applications

The increase of populatioin in the world will be accompanied by the increase of energy need. The energy is not available in all time, sometime we lack of energy and also sometime the energy is available in abundant and in turn the energy wasted to nature. Therefore efforts have to be conducted to solve the problem. One of those is to make a cell which can store the excessive energy so called a supercapacitor. The supercapacitor in this research was fabricated using an activated carbon from the palm kernel shell (PKS). The performace of biomass-based activated carbon as an electrode for Electric Double Layer Capacitor (EDLC) was investigated using the cyclic voltammetry method. The test of EDLC was conducted using three electrode system, with carbon as the working electrode, Ag/AgCl as the reference electrode, Pt as the auxiliary electrode and 0.5 M H₂SO₄ solution as the electrolyte. The carbon tested was activated carbon pyrolysis at temperature 700°C, 800°C, and 900°C. Testing was carried out by varying the scanning rate in 5 and 100 mV s⁻¹. The test was carried out using a potentiostat by settling the potential value between −0.2 V to 0.7 V. The results showed that activated carbon at 5 mV s⁻¹ has the highest capacitance value of 49.76 F/g. It is also noted that the specific capacitance decreased by increasing scanning rates.