Fabrication and characterization of carbon nanotube based supercapacitor electrodes

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Tezin Türü: Yüksek Lisans

Tezin Yürütüldüğü Kurum: Orta Doğu Teknik Üniversitesi, Mühendislik Fakültesi, Metalurji ve Malzeme Mühendisliği Bölümü, Türkiye

Tezin Onay Tarihi: 2016

Öğrenci: ITIR BAKIŞ DOĞRU

Eş Danışman: HÜSNÜ EMRAH ÜNALAN, RAŞİT TURAN

Özet:

Nanotechnology has started a new era where the nano-sized particles are manipulated. These nano-sized particles have lots of applications in a number of fields. Although carbon is one of the most abundant elements of the Earth or human body, in recent years it get an incredible perspective because of its nano-sized constructions like fullerene, graphene, graphite and carbon nanotubes. Carbon nanotubes are flawless cylinders consists of carbon where their radius are a few nanometers while their lengths are at least in micron range. Along the tube, delocalized electrons can freely move. When there are vertically aligned carbon nanotube forests, they form a desirable structure for energy storage devices as they have high aspect ratio. In this thesis carbon nanotubes are grown on aluminum foils through chemical vapor deposition method and then performed as supercapacitor electrodes. First, aluminum foils are deposited with catalyst via physical vapor deposition or ultrasonic spray pyrolysis method. Both commercial kitchen foil and pure aluminum foil are used for the carbon nanotube growth and compared. Afterwards, the effects of chemical vapor deposition parameters are studied. Finally, aluminum foils with CNTs are utilized as supercapacitor electrodes and the flexibility of these electrodes samples are assessed.