Nitrogen and oxygen dual-doped hierarchical porous carbon derived from rapeseed meal for high performance lithium–sulfur batteries

Abstract There is an ever-increasing interest in the utilization of biomass carbon materials as the host materials of sulfur for Li–S batteries. Herein, an in-situ N (1.67 at%) and O (12.1 at%) dual-doped porous carbon derived from rapeseed meal has been fabricated by KOH activation and subsequent carbonization. The obtained material possesses abundant micropores and mesopores with a relatively high specific surface area of 2434.9 m 2 g −1 and a large pore volume of 1.49 cm 3 g −1 , contributing to physical and chemical dual-adsorption for polysulfides. The carbon material is composited with sulfur, delivers a high reversible capacity of 1259 mAh g −1 at 0.1 C and exhibits excellent cycling stability (512 mAh g −1 after 200 cycles at the areal mass loading of S of 2.4 mg cm −2 ). This work proposes an efficient method to develop carbon-based electrode materials with heteroatom dual-doped hierarchical framework from waste for high performance Li–S batteries.