Carbon-Doped Hollow Titania with Tuneable Shell Architecture for Supercapacitors

A new trend in supercapacitor research has focussed on the construction of inexpensive electrode materials with high capacitor performances. In this study, we demonstrate the successful preparation of carbon-doped hollow titania spheres. The as-prepared titania spheres not only exhibit an advantage over existing methods because they are created in situ by directly carbonizing cationic polystyrene templates without the addition of carbon precursors, but also feature a narrow pore size distribution and a tuneable shell architecture. When the materials were applied as supercapacitor anodes, the electrochemical results reveal the superior performances of the supercapacitors over that of commercial P25. The higher performances were attributed to carbon doping. Thus, the reported C-doped hollow titania shows more potential as electrode materials for high-performance supercapacitors.