Facile fabrication of carbon materials with hierarchical porous structure for high-performance supercapacitors

Abstract Compared with bulk materials, porous electrodes possess superior supercapacitive performance due to the effective enlarged specific surface areas, which have aroused tremendous attention in recent years. In this work, porous carbon materials derived from glucose were facilely fabricated via a hydrothermal pre-carbonisation-calcination strategy using sodium dodecyl sulfate (SDS) as the dispersant and ZnCl2 as the activation agent. Benefitting from the uniform dispersion of SDS and the activation effect of ZnCl2, the optimised sample, SAGC-1-4, possesses a hierarchical porous structure with large specific surface area (2360 m2 g−1) and huge total pore volume (1.241 cm3 g−1), leading to an enhanced supercapacitive performance. As a result, SAGC-1-4 presented a specific capacitance of 303.02 F g−1 at 1.0 A g−1 in the three-electrode configuration. Meanwhile, the SAGC-1-4-based symmetric supercapacitor displayed an excellent rate performance with a high energy density of 31.59 Wh kg−1 at a power density of 400.00 W kg−1 in comparison with many carbon materials previously reported. Thus, our work offers an effective strategy for the fabrication of porous carbon for high-performance energy conversion and storage devices.