Journal of Materials Science: Materials in Electronics, cilt.34, sa.4, 2023 (SCI-Expanded)
Upcycling of electronic waste is the efficient strategy to minimize the negative effect on environment. In the present study, e-waste (originating from small household appliances) was upcycled into the metal contented pyrolytic carbon (C-WPCB) through a simple pyrolysis without activation or any other additional processes. After crushing and fractionating, pyrolysis was performed at 500 °C under nitrogen atmosphere. The obtained metallic pyrolytic carbon was characterized by well-known techniques such as SEM–EDS, XRF, XRD, ATR/FT-IR, TG/DTG, and BET analyses and utilized for supercapacitor electrode preparation. For this purpose, nickel foam was electrochemically coated by C-WPCB which was previously dispersed in three different solutions: 1.5 M H2SO4, 3 M KCl, and 1.5 M KOH, respectively. Electrochemical characterization of the prepared electrodes was performed by cyclic voltammetry (CV) at different scan rates and galvanostatic charge–discharge (GCD) methods at different current densities in 6 M KOH electrolyte in half-cell configuration. The best performance was obtained for the electrode prepared in H2SO4 solution where the specific capacitance, specific power, and specific energy were found as 39.5 F/g, 25.0 kW/kg, and 16.5 Wh/kg at 5 A/g, respectively.