Biomass derived carbonaceous materials with tailored superstructures designed for advanced supercapacitor electrodes

Abstract

Supercapacitors (SC), as one of the most competitive energy storage devices, are receiving great attention in R&D community. Carbonaceous materials for supercapacitor electrodes with high performance possess many attractive advantages, such as large specific surface area (SSA), hierarchical porous superstructures and excellent conductivity. Herein, biomass based materials are often utilized as versatile precursors for activated carbon production due to their inherent merits, including low cost, abundance, renewability, high carbon content, environmental friendliness, genetically unique nature structure. As known, the capacitance performance of biomass based carbon-assembled supercapacitors is mainly directly proportional to the exceptional skeleton robustness, high SSA and electroactive site content within carbonaceous framework. In this review, special attentions will be paid to the latest research progress of carbonaceous materials derived from biomass with tailored hierarchical superstructures to highlight their impact on the electrochemical performance of assembled supercapacitor. The objective of this paper is to present a critical review on the most recent publication related to biomass oriented carbonaceous electrodes for outstanding supercapacitor electrodes. Furthermore, the perspective for the progress and development of biomass based carbonaceous electrodes for high performance supercapacitors will also be provided, to underscore the current critical issues and future opportunities. • Carbon derived from biomass with tailored structure for supercapacitors was reviewed. • Methods for activating carbon with improved capacitance were reviewed and discussed. • Biomass based carbon and their key parameters/ characterizations were summarized. • The reasons why biomass derived carbon are suitable for electrodes were demonstrated. • Preparation methods and applications of biomass derived carbon were summarized and prospected.