One-step nitrogen, boron codoping of porous carbons derived from pomelo peels for supercapacitor electrode materials

Abstract

In this work, porous KOH-activated biomass carbon (KBC) was obtained from pomelo peel, a simple and effective strategy of one-step incorporating N and B into the porous carbon was introduced. Ammonium borate trihydrate was successfully used to fabricate N, B-codoped KOH-activated biomass carbon (NBKBC) in one-step. NBKBC shows a slight reduction in specific surface area but a distinct higher specific capacitance than KBC. Furthermore, the as prepared NBKBC electrode exhibits an excellent cycling performance. These excellent electrochemical properties of NBKBC were on account of high specific surface area and abundant hierarchically honeycomb-like pores, in particular, N, B codoping. Results shows that it is promising to use such one-step N, B codoping of porous carbons for the synthesis of high performance supercapacitor electrode materials with cheap and easy-available biomass carbons as precursors.