Turning Hazardous Diesel Soot into High Performance Carbon/MnO2 Supercapacitive Energy Storage Material

Diesel exhaust is one of the main sources of atmospheric soot and fine particles. These particles are known to cause human cancer, heart and lung damage, and mental disfunctioning and are responsible for millions of deaths every year. While research and development to reduce diesel particulate emission is ongoing, there is no policy to dispose of or recycle the produced soot. An alternative would be to harness the diesel soot to produce carbon and its nanocomposites. This can be used for value-added products like materials used in energy storage electrodes in supercapacitor devices or Li-ion batteries. In the outlined article, a one-step treatment of diesel soot, collected from the exhaust tube of a diesel engine is demonstrated to synthesize core shell alpha-MnO2 center dot 0.3H(2)O/carbon nanocomposite. The obtained carbon nanocomposite exhibits concurrent high conductivity and meso/microporosity in conjunction with hydrophilicity leading to a high performance electrode by storing 425 F/g (@.5 mV/s) and 185.76 F/g (@0.8 A/g) in a supercapacitor cell with 97.5% capacitance retention over 5000 GCD cycles. Furthermore, the nanocomposite obtained from diesel soot demonstrated efficient supercapacitive performance by maintaining high energy density 25.5 Wh/kg at 555.2 W/kg (power density).