Highly porous CeO2 nanostructures prepared via combustion synthesis for supercapacitor applications

We report highly porous CeO2 nanostructures (CeO2 NSs) suitable for supercapacitor applications, synthesized using a fast and cost effective combustion approach. Due to its prominent valence states of Ce3+/Ce4+, CeO2 has emerged as a promising pseudocapacitive material. The drawback of using CeO2 as a supercapacitor electrode is its poor electrical conductivity. We overcame this drawback of CeO2 by creating oxygen vacancies on its surface, which act to enhance its electrical conductivity. The physical interpretation of the as-synthesized CeO2 NSs shows that they have dense active sites and diffusion pathways that enhance the performance of the electrode in a supercapacitor. Electrodes prepared using the synthesized CeO2 NSs exhibited the initial specific capacitance of 134.6 F g−1 and superior cycling stability of 92.5% after 1000 cycles at a constant current density of 1 A g−1, indicating their potential suitability for use as efficient electrode for supercapacitor devices. The facile synthesis method used herein would help to reduce the cost and time required to synthesize CeO2 particles and also would avoid the need to research and/or synthesize beneficial composite structures for enhancing the electrochemical properties of CeO2 based electrodes.