Building towards Supercapacitors with Safer Electrolytes and Carbon Electrodes from Natural Resources

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors reviewed the electrochemical performance of supercapacitors based on carbon electrodes obtained from various natural resources and their compatibility with safer and cheaper electrolytes, giving readers a brief introduction of concepts and basic information for supercapacitor. Therefore, I recommend accepting it after major revisions.

The authors should carefully check the manuscript since there are a lot of typos. For instance, Line 18: “A The growing interest for energy storage devices such as supercapacitors pushes….” There are two prepositions in this sentence.

Line 364: the caption should be revised from “Figure 1” to “Figure 7”

Line 357: “Anthracite is the highest class of coal It has a dark black color, featuring a low moisture content and a nearly 95% carbon content”.

Etc.

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The review article “Towards supercapacitors with safer electrolytes and carbon electrodes from natural resources” provides comprehensive information on the subject. It is a good effort to collect literature from past research and present it here in the form of a review article that would be easily available for the scientists working in this area of research.

The following minor comments need to be addressed before final publication of this review article.

1-      The abstract of the review article need to be more descriptive which can reflect the title of the review article.

2-      The introduction part needs to be revised with more details and please cite the most recent article. Very few articles have been cited from the recent past (2020-2023).

3-      Figs. 1, 2, 3 and 4 need to be improved for better quality. It’s better to redraw them again instead to use the same copied image.

4-      At line 362; Figure 1 is written again. Please correct it. Structural formulas in the fig. are not clear enough for the reader point of view. Please write them again.

5-      Please recheck the whole manuscript for grammatical errors and spelling mistakes.

The review article could be accepted after minor corrections.

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

The application of supercapacitors is one key option for further energy systems and has gained great successes in recent years by overcoming its inherent barriers. The submitted review presents the latest research work on basic components of supercapacitors, especially on the electrolytes and carbon electrode materials derived from natural resources. However, in my opinion, the overall discussion and mining of these aspects is inadequate and sketchy for a high-quality review. Here are some comments that should be considered.

1. Many systematic reviews on the progresses of safety electrolyte and carbon electrode materials for supercapacitors have been discussed by other groups, the authors should mention the main differences or novelties of this review directly comparing with others’ publications.

2. Some sections are written too roughly or inconditely, with only basic definitions or general information on the corresponding aspect, e.g., part “3. Carbon Materials for Supercapacitors” and part “4. Electrolytes”. Extensions, especially on the developments or progresses of the main systems, are suggested .

3. In part 4. Electrolyte, only the two features of conductivity and voltage window are simply included, discussions on the safety and cost factors to improve its relevance to practical applications is suggested in the main text.

4. In part “5. Activated Biochar-based Supercapacitors Operating with Aqueous Electrolytes”, the authors mainly discussed the influences of surface area and porosity on the battery performances. Other important factors, such as compositions (element doping, defects), surface functional groups, and material structures (compositing, interfacial structures), are not even mentioned.

5. The authors listed the reported electrochemical properties for some carbon materials and their electrolyte, however, the corresponding compatibilities as indicated in the abstract section are not given and discussed.

Moderate editing of English language required

Author Response

see attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 4 Report

In this manuscript, the authors reviewed the electrochemical performance of supercapacitors based on carbon electrodes obtained from various natural resources and their compatibility with safer and cheaper electrolytes. There are some issues that need to be addressed for future publication. Detailed comments are as follows.

1.    The title and the overall content of the manuscript is a little not very matched, please consider.

2.    Part 2 and part 3 seem strong science popularization, it will be better to add some application in supercapacitors.

3.    The contents in Part 5 and 6 are overlapped with part 3 and 4. I think the structure of the manuscript can be adjusted appropriately.

4.    Some details should be checked. Like the figure number (figure in Part 6), and the format of captions should be unified.

5.    Now that the paper is corresponding to Supercapacitors, several relative papers are essential to be added into your Introduction Parts such as Density and porosity optimization of graphene monoliths with high mass-loading for high-volumetric-capacitance electrodes (doi:10.1002/bte2.20220017), Progress on carbon for electrochemical capacitors(doi:10.1002/bte2.20220021), https://doi.org/10.1002/bte2.20220058

Moderate English language modification is needed.

Author Response

Dear Editor,
Thank you very much for having accepted with revisions our manuscript entitled: "Towards supercapacitors with safer
electrolytes and carbon electrodes from natural resources".
We did our best to satisfy reviewers requests.
Please find below the answer to the referee.
sincerely.
REVIEWER #5
1. The title and the overall content of the manuscript is a little not very matched, please consider.
2. Part 2 and part 3 seem strong science popularization, it will be better to add some application in supercapacitors.
3. The contents in Part 5 and 6 are overlapped with part 3 and 4. I think the structure of the manuscript can be
adjusted appropriately.
We moved some paragraph linking the scholastic description to the application in supercapacitors, we also tried to
better highlight the objective of the review.
4. Some details should be checked. Like the figure number (figure in Part 6), and the format of captions should be
unified.
done
5. Now that the paper is corresponding to Supercapacitors, several relative papers are essential to be added into
your Introduction Parts such as Density and porosity optimization of graphene monoliths with high mass-loading for
high-volumetric-capacitance electrodes (doi:10.1002/bte2.20220017), Progress on carbon for electrochemical
capacitors(doi:10.1002/bte2.20220021), https://doi.org/10.1002/bte2.20220058,
We added the articles that the reviewer suggested, and some more including our previous work

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

As the authors have considered the comments from the reviewer and revised the manuscript systematically.  It is acceptable to be published in the present form.

Author Response

Thank you for accepting our wor

Reviewer 4 Report

The comments have been well reveised. I recommend acceptance in current form.

Author Response

Thank you for accepting our paper