One-pot green mass production of hierarchically porous carbon via a recyclable salt-templating strategy

Abstract

Porous carbon materials have exhibited a series of promising applications in supercapacitors and other research fields, yet still confronting the complicated synthetic procedures and massive usage of toxic reagents. Herein, we propose a green and one-pot method to produce heteroatom-doped hierarchical porous carbon materials in large-scale without any toxic reagents employed. Eventually, the as-prepared nitrogen-doped porous carbon (NPC) displays a high specific surface area of 2018 m2 g−1 together with abundant heteroatom dopants (14.8 wt% O and 1.03 wt% N). The potassium carbonate template can be recycled via a simple rinsing and re-precipitation process. Furthermore, the as-prepared nitrogen-doped porous carbon delivers a high specific capacitance of 361 F g−1 at 0.5 A g−1 and excellent rate capability of 240 F g−1 at 20 A g−1 (66.5% capacitance retention). Finally, considering the low-price raw materials and facile green synthesis procedure, the present approach can be easily scalable to prepare biomass-derived heteroatoms doped porous carbon, which is not only applicable for supercapacitor but also for other research fields.