Abstract
In recent decades, the climate change and the limited reserves of fossil fuels, and energy security concerns, have promoted internationally interest in developing renewable energy technologies from renewable and endurable energy resources. In fact, there is a speedy increase in renewable energy productions from wind and solar energy, the most bountiful and easily available resources. Given the intermittent nature of solar and wind energy, efficient energy storage systems are urgently required to make the best of the electricity generated from these sources since they can boost the effective and reliability use of the entire power system by storing energy when in excess while releasing it when in high demand. For this purpose, supercapacitors have been promising candidates for the energy storage requirement. In this study, we reported the synthesis of graphitic nanofibers/three dimensional graphene (GNFs/3D graphene) hybrid nanostructure on highly porous nickel foam via thermal chemical vapor deposition (CVD) process. This hybrid nanostructure demonstrated to possess a large surface area and showed an excellent specific capacitance of 59.28 F g-1 at a current density of 1 A g-1, good cycle stability with capacitance retention of 90.66 % after 1000 cycles in 6 M KOH electrolyte. These results suggested that this hybrid nanostructure is a promising candidate which provides a simple and effective technique to prepare electrodes for supercapacitor.