Pore regulation of wood-derived hierarchical porous carbon for improving electrochemical performance

Abstract

Realizing the pore structure regulation in biomass porous carbon electrodes has played a key role in improving the performance of supercapacitors. In this work, a facile strategy was proposed to regulate the pore structure by enriching mesoporous prepolymers in the waste wood with intrinsically uncontrollable morphology. As a result, the volume of mesopores effectively increased from 0.11 to 0.48 cm3 g−1, and the range for pore size was also expanded to 2-12 nm, which facilitated the fast ion migration of aqueous electrolytes. Under the premises of the similar carbon loading the obtained wooden porous carbon displayed excellent specific capacitance of 323 F g−1 at a current density of 0.5 A g−1, which was superior to that of carbon electrode sourced directly from waste wood and most other biomass carbons. Meanwhile, the symmetric supercapacitors assembled by the P-MC exhibited a good energy density of 9.62 Wh/kg at a power density of 47.2 W/kg and outstanding cycling stability (98.2% capacitance retention after 10000 charge/discharge cycles at 2 A g−1) in 6 M KOH electrolytes. This work proved a new strategy to value-added utilization for waste wood, which expanded its application in supercapacitors, and turned the waste into treasures.