Synthesis of mesoporous tubular carbon using natural tubular Halloysite as template for supercapacitor

Abstract

Mesoporous tubular carbon (MTC) with high specific surface area has attracted increasing attention due to their low density, fast ion diffusion and good electrical conductivity for supercapacitors. In this work, MTC was synthesized by using resin as carbon precursor, natural tubular Halloysite and F127 as hard-soft templates respectively. The resulted MTC copied the tubular structure of Halloysite. The addition of F127 not only created more abundant pores, but also greatly improved the surface area. The N2 adsorption experiments showed that the MTC possesses a large specific surface area (1034 m2 g−1) and large pore volumes (2.62 m3 g−1). The TEM of MTC showed an obvious tubular structure with abundant mesoporous structure. As the electrode material, MTC had good electrochemical capacitance (232 F g−1) at current density of 1 A g−1 and excellent cycling stability (95.3% after 5000 cycles) at the current density of 5 A g−1 in 6 M KOH electrolyte. The strategy may offer a low-cost and scalable method to produce high-performance electrode materials by using inexpensive natural product as a template.