Developing a facile, effective, and economical methods for the preparation of activated carbon remains an active area of research. Conventionally, chemical activation using acidic or basic activating agents is broadly employed to achieve a high surface area; however, such chemicals are often hazardous, corrosive and environmentally harmful. On the other hand, physical activation methods that avoid such chemical activating agents are comparatively less explored, despite their potential advantages in terms of safety and sustainability. Moreover, the application of physically activated commercial carbon as an electrode material in supercapacitor devices employing ionic liquid electrolytes remains largely unexplored. In this work, we report a simple and economical physical activation strategy involving the water pre-treatment of commercial carbon, resulting in a high specific surface area of 1087.24 m 2 /g. The physically activated carbon was further employed as an electrode material for triazolium ionic liquid-based supercapacitors. Two device configurations were assembled, utilizing stainless steel and nickel foam as current collectors. Electrochemical performance was first assessed through three-electrode studies using cyclic voltammetry (CV) and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS). The charge-discharge behaviour of the prototypes was analysed by Galvanostatic Charge Discharge (GCD) studies. The nickel foam-based device exhibited an energy density of 6.78 Wh/kg and a power density of 1109.4 W/kg, retaining 73.3% of its capacitance after 2500 cycles, whereas the stainless steel-based device achieved an energy density of 3.13 Wh/kg and a power density of 637.69 W/kg, with 81.4% cyclic retention after 2500 cycles.
Muraleedharan et al. (2026) studied this question.