Highly nitrogen and sulfur dual-doped carbon microspheres for supercapacitors

Abstract

Heteroatom doping, especially dual-doped carbon materials have attracted much attention for the past few years, and have been regarded as one of the most efficient strategies to enhance the capacitance behavior of porous carbon materials. In this work, a facile two-step synthetic route was developed to fabricate nitrogen and sulfur co-doped carbon microsphere (NSCM) by using thiourea as dopant. The N/S doping content is controlled via varying the carbonization temperature. It has been proved that a suitable quantity of N and S groups could not only provide pseudo-capacitance but also promote the electron transfer for carbon materials, which ensures the further utilization of the exposed surfaces for charge storage. The optimized NSCM prepared at a carbonization temperature of 800°C (NSCM-800) achieves a capacitance of 277.1Fg−1 at a current density of 0.3Ag−1 in 6.0molL−1 KOH electrolyte, which is 71% higher than that of undoped carbon microsphere. Besides, NSCM-800 shows an excellent cycling stability, 98.2% of the initial capacitance is retained after 5,000 cycles at a current density of 3.0Ag−1.