Facile and green synthesis of TiN/C as electrode materials for supercapacitors

In this work, we proposed a facile and green method involving just two steps of dispersion and annealing to in-situ synthesize TiN/C composite materials. First, the nitrogen and titanium sources were combined by a complexing agent in the dispersion process, and then TiN/C composite materials were obtained by annealing the solid precursors from centrifuging the above solution in nitrogen atmosphere. High-density TiN nanoparticles with the size of ∼10 nm are dispersed uniformly on carbon matrix, and the composite has a high specific surface area up to 148 m ² /g. When used as supercapacitor electrode materials, the composite exhibits relatively high specific capacitance of 159.0 F/g at 0.5 A/g, and good rate performance with specific capacitance of 96.0 F/g at 20 A/g. The current facile method could be a promising strategy for the low-cost and large-scale synthesis of metal nitride/carbon composite materials.