High-yield ramie derived carbon toward high-performance supercapacitors

Abstract

Biomass porous carbon possesses prominent advantages of high specific surface area, appropriate pore distribution and excellent chemical stability, making them suitable for electrode materials of supercapacitor. However, achieving its high yield based on remarkably structural integrity of biomass derived carbon at the molecular level is extremely difficult due to the incompatibility between low-activity biomass chains and highly polymerized polymer chains. Here, we demonstrate a universal self-crosslinked strategy to effectively build the high-yield ramie derived carbon (hy-RDC) by molecularly regulating high-activity ramie precursor and hydroxy-protonated phenolic resin synergistically. Benefiting from the chemical compatibility between cellulose chain and phenolic chain and the structural integrity of ramie, this hy-RDC remarkably possesses a high yield of 31.33%, much higher than pure ramie carbon (3.56%) and pure phenolic carbon (15.22%) solely. These hy-RDC-based supercapacitors deliver an outstanding energy density of 35.58 Wh kg−1 at a high power density of 51.24 kW kg−1 than pure ramie carbon (34.29 Wh kg−1 at 51.22 kW kg−1) and pure phenolic carbon (14.08 Wh kg−1 at 46.09 kW kg−1). Evidently, this work may give a way to obtain high-yield biomass carbon with the effective electrochemical performance and the excellent structural stability, and dramatically promoting the energy storage application of biomass carbon.