Nickel cobalt oxide nanowires‐modified hollow carbon tubular bundles for high‐performance sodium‐ion hybrid capacitors.

Summary: Sodium‐ion hybrid capacitors are a prospective energy storage device candidate that couples the superiorities of battery‐type and capacitive storage mechanisms. In this study, we fabricate a composite of NiCo2O4 nanowires with carbon tubular bundles (CTBs) via a facile hydrothermal and annealing procedure. The density functional theory (DFT) calculations are performed to evaluate the bonding strength between the two components of the composite, the binding energy of the NiCo2O4 is calculated to be −0.952 J m−2, indicating that the NiCo2O4 nanowires can be stabilized on both sides of the carbon tubular bundles, which leads to a good cycling performance. Moreover, the composite in this work exhibits a metallic property because of the introduction of carbon material. As expected, when used for sodium storage, the NiCo2O4/CTBs shows a high capacity of 298 mA h g−1 at 1 A g−1 and high capacity retention of 92% after 500 cycles, which are superior than the bare NiCo2O4 electrode. Consequently, the sodium‐ion hybrid capacitor is also assembled with NiCo2O4/carbon tubular bundles and commercial activated carbon, which achieves high energy density of 99 Wh kg−1 in a wide potential range from 0.5 V to 4.0 V. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]