Facile Self-templating Melting Route Preparation of Biomass-derived Hierarchical Porous Carbon for Advanced Supercapacitors

Abstract

Biomass-derived porous carbons show great potential as electrode materials for supercapacitors due to the environmental friendliness. However, most of the carbonaceous electrode materials suffer from low specific capacitance and rate capacity because of the poor porosity. Here, we reported a simple and effective approach to prepare micro/nano-hierarchical structured carbon materials derived from rice husk by NaOH-KOH molten salt co-activation. The as-prepared activated carbons exhibit high porosity and suitable pore size distributions for more electrolyte ion adsorption, which are all beneficial for achieving remarkable electrochemical performances, such as high specific capacitance(194.6 F/g), excellent rate capability(retention of 85.9%) and outstanding cycling stability. Thus, the above biomass-derived carbon materials with high porosity and micro/nano structures obtained by co-activation method offered a new insight into novel electrode material for the use in energy storage systems with high energy density and excellent rate performance.