Phytic acid-induced self-assembled chitosan gel-derived N, P–co-doped porous carbon for high-performance CO2 capture and supercapacitor

Abstract Heteroatom-doped porous carbon materials (HPCMs) have attracted great attention due to their excellent physical and chemical properties and the enhanced performance of multiple heteroatom co-doping. Herein, N, P-co-doped porous carbon materials (NPPCs) are developed via a novel synthesis of the phytic acid-induced self-assembled chitosan aerogel followed by pyrolysis and activation. Phytic acid serves as a P source, acid regulator and structure-directing agent for improved activation efficiency to create more pores. A little of NaNO3 is used both as a template and activator simultaneously. The porosity and N content of such NPPCs are controlled by rationally tuning the pyrolysis temperature and the mount of NaNO3. The NPPC-0.75-600 delivers a good CO2 adsorption capability of 3.02 and 5.31 mmol g−1 at 100 and 500 kPa, respectively, and has an excellent stability with almost no adsorption capacity decay even after successive 20 cycles. For supercapacitors (SCs), the NPPC-0.75-700 also displays a high capacitance of 231.2 F g−1 at 1 A g−1 and an outstanding stability at circa 96.7% initial capacity after 10000 cycles. These results highlight the great potential of such NPPCs in CO2 capture and SCs, and the novel synthetical route offers new insights for the readily scalable production of HPCMs.