The difficulty in characterizing the complex structures of nanoporous carbon electrodes has led to a lack of clear design principles with which to improve supercapacitors. Pore size has long been considered the main lever to improve capacitance. However, our evaluation of a large series of commercial nanoporous carbons finds a lack of correlation between pore size and capacitance. Instead, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy measurements and simulations reveal a strong correlation between structural disorder in the electrodes and capacitance. More disordered carbons with smaller graphene-like domains show higher capacitances owing to the more efficient storage of ions in their nanopores. Our findings suggest ways to understand and exploit disorder to achieve highly energy-dense supercapacitors.

中文翻译：

---

结构无序决定纳米多孔碳的电容

表征纳米多孔碳电极复杂结构的困难导致缺乏改进超级电容器的明确设计原则。长期以来，孔径尺寸一直被认为是提高电容的主要手段。然而，我们对大量商用纳米多孔碳的评估发现孔径和电容之间缺乏相关性。相反，核磁共振波谱测量和模拟揭示了电极结构紊乱与电容之间的强相关性。由于纳米孔中离子的存储效率更高，具有更小的类石墨烯域的更无序的碳表现出更高的电容。我们的研究结果提出了理解和利用无序来实现高能量密度超级电容器的方法。