Insights into the estimation of capacitance for carbon-based supercapacitors

Abstract

Carbon-based materials are broadly used as the active component of electric double layer capacitors (EDLCs) in energy storage systems with a high power density. Most of the reported computational studies have investigated the electrochemical properties under equilibrium conditions, limiting the direct and practical use of the results to design electrochemical energy systems. In the present study, for the first time, the experimental data from more than 300 published papers have been extracted and then analyzed through an optimized support vector machine (SVM) by a grey wolf optimization (GWO) algorithm to obtain a correlation between carbon-based structural features and EDLC performance. Several structural features, including calculated pore size, specific surface area, N-doping level, I_D/I_G ratio, and applied potential window were selected as the input variables to determine their impact on the respective capacitances. Sensitivity analysis, which has only been performed in this study for approximating the EDLC capacitance, indicated that the specific surface area of the carbon-based supercapacitors is of the greatest effect on the corresponding capacitance. The proposed SVM-GWO, with an R² value of 0.92, showed more accuracy than all the other proposed machine learning (ML) models employed for this purpose.