A tunable hierarchical porous carbon from starch pretreated by calcium acetate for high performance supercapacitors

Hierarchical porous carbons (HPCs) with abundant mesopores have been prepared by a facile route from the starch that was pretreated by calcium acetate. The scanning electron microscopy (SEM), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), X-ray diffraction (XRD), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), Raman spectroscopy, and N2 adsorption–desorption tests show that hierarchical porous carbons with bimodal mesopores have been obtained. Moreover, the pore sizes are tunable by simply adjusting the reactants ratio and carbonization temperature. The as-synthesized hierarchical porous carbon materials (HPCs-2-800) possesses the highest Brunauer-Emmett-Teller (BET)-specific surface area of 464 m2 g−1 and mesoporous volume of 0.663 cm3 g−1 at the carbonization temperature of 800 °C and starch to calcium acetate mass ratio of 2. Electrochemical measurements also display that the HPCs-2-800 electrodes have a high reversible capacity of 244 F g−1 at the current density of 0.1 A g−1 and 182 F g−1 at the current density of 10 A g−1. When the current density is elevated from 0.1 to 10 A g−1, the high capacitance retention of 74.6 % reveals a good rate performance. Long charge–discharge cycling measurements disclose good stabilities over 25,000 cycles at different current densities of 1–10 A g−1 (5000 cycles at each current density) for HPCs-2-800 electrode. The cycling results indicate a high capacitance retention of 99.6 % over 5000 charge–discharge cycles even at the current density of 10 A g−1. The excellent supercapacitive performances imply that HPCs-2-800 is a promising candidate for supercapacitors.