Manufacturing structured carbon with tunable three-dimensional (3D) architectures remains a major hurdle for widescale use due to process complexity and high cost of current methods. This work demonstrates the fabrication of structured carbon using selective laser sintering (SLS)-based additive manufacturing, enabling control over both the macroscopic geometry and the nanoscale pore textures. Our process employs polyethylene (PE) as the carbon precursor and only involves steps of printing, cross-linking, and pyrolysis. The incomplete coalescence of PE particles during printing results in the formation of a macroporous structure. Moreover, we demonstrate the production of 3D-printed carbon-cobalt nanocomposites through a simple metal immersion step prior to pyrolysis. The electrochemical properties of these structured carbons and carbon-cobalt nanocomposites were investigated, revealing enhanced performance attributed to the synergistic effects of electric double-layer capacitance and pseudocapacitance. Our method is resource-efficient, utilizes inexpensive precursors, and is capable of imparting functional nanoparticles to the carbon matrix. The resulting structured carbon-based electrodes exhibit high charge storage capacity, highlighting their potential for next-generation, 3D-printable electrochemical energy storage devices.
Griffin et al. (Thu,) studied this question.