A novel Cr2O3-carbon composite as a high performance pseudo-capacitor electrode material

Novel graphitic material containing chromium oxide (Cr2O3) nanoribbons is obtained by carbonizing a mixture of polyfurfuryl alcohol and MIL–101(Cr) at 900 °C. Morphological, structural, and chemical analysis of the product is carried out with HR–TEM, SEM, XPS, XRD, and BET surface area. The maximum BET surface area recorded for the nanocomposite is 438 m2 g−1. The nanocomposite exhibits a specific capacitance as high as 300 F g−1 at 2 mV s−1 and 291 F g−1 at 0.25 A g−1, and presents 95.5% long–term cycling stability over 3000 cycles. The pseudo-capacitive role of Cr2O3 nanoribbons is found to be important towards total capacitance of nanocomposite material.