A new strategy to tailor the structure of sustainable 3D hierarchical porous N-self-doped carbons from renewable biomass for high-performance supercapacitors and CO2 capture

Xing Tong; Hao Zhuo; Sha Wang; Linxin Zhong; Yijie Hu; Xinwen Peng; Weijia Zhou; Runcang Sun

doi:10.1039/C6RA01565D

A new strategy to tailor the structure of sustainable 3D hierarchical porous N-self-doped carbons from renewable biomass for high-performance supercapacitors and CO₂ capture†

Xing Tong,^a Hao Zhuo,^a Sha Wang,^a Linxin Zhong,*^a Yijie Hu,^a Xinwen Peng,*^a Weijia Zhou^b and Runcang Sun^c

* Corresponding authors

^a State Key Laboratory of Pulp and Paper Engineering, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, P. R. China
E-mail: lxzhong0611@scut.edu.cn, fexwpeng@scut.edu.cn

^b School of Environment and Energy, South China University of Technology, Guangzhou, P. R. China

^c Beijing Key Laboratory of Lignocellulosic Chemistry, Beijing Forestry University, Beijing, China

Abstract

Hierarchical porous N-doped carbons show great potential applications in energy storage and CO₂ capture. Renewable biomass chitosan, which is abundant and simultaneously contains large amounts of N and C, is an ideal alternative to fossil resources for sustainable and scale-up production of cost-effective N-self-doped carbons. In this work, we employed a new and effective strategy to obtain 3D hierarchical porous N-self-doped carbons from chitosan. The hierarchical porous structure of the N-self-doped carbons could be easily tailored to obtain nanorod interconnected and fiber-wall interconnected architectures without using any porogen, catalyst or activator. The nanorod interconnected porous carbon displayed a high specific surface area of 1408 m² g⁻¹ while the fiber-wall interconnected porous carbon exhibited an excellent specific capacitance of 261 F g⁻¹ (0.5 A g⁻¹) due to the desirable hierarchical framework. In addition, these hierarchical porous carbons had a good CO₂ capture performance (3.07–3.44 mmol g⁻¹ at 25 °C). This unique method is supposed to be a new strategy to create novel 3D hierarchical porous carbons for promising applications in supercapacitors, lithium ion batteries, fuel cells and sorbents.

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Article information

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1039/C6RA01565D
Article type: Paper
Submitted: 19 Jan 2016
Accepted: 08 Mar 2016
First published: 31 Mar 2016

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RSC Adv., 2016,6, 34261-34270

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A new strategy to tailor the structure of sustainable 3D hierarchical porous N-self-doped carbons from renewable biomass for high-performance supercapacitors and CO₂ capture

X. Tong, H. Zhuo, S. Wang, L. Zhong, Y. Hu, X. Peng, W. Zhou and R. Sun, RSC Adv., 2016, 6, 34261 DOI: 10.1039/C6RA01565D

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