Advanced porous hierarchical activated carbon derived from agricultural wastes toward high performance supercapacitors

Abstract Porous hierarchical activated carbons (HACs) exhibit fascinating physical properties and are promising for supercapacitor applications. Facile and universal methods are required to produce high performance HACs on a large scale to boost their practical applications. An economical and template free method has been used to prepare HACs from lignocellulosic agricultural wastes with different contents of cellulose. These amorphous HACs exhibit high conductivity, a large specific surface area, and promising potentials for high performance supercapacitors. This study suggests the feasibility for facile and scalable conversion of inexpensive and earth-abundant agricultural wastes into high value-added carbon materials for energy storage applications.