Molten alkaline synthesis of highly porous carbon from calcium carbide

Abstract Carbide-derived carbons (CDC) represent a kind of typical and fascinating porous carbon materials (PCM) for broad applications but demand hazardous chlorine to fulfil the conversion into carbon. Here in this study, we report the facile fabrication of PCM with rich porosity from mild molten alkaline-treated calcium carbide (CaC 2 ). Resulted PCM under optimized synthesis conditions exhibited large specific surface area (∼839 m 2  g −1 ) and specific capacitance (403 F g −1 at current density of 0.5 A g −1 ). Meanwhile, fairly good rate capability of retaining over 63% capacitance at large current density of 5 A g −1 , and robust cycling performance (∼5% fading after 5000 cycles at high rate of 5 A g −1 ) can be also obtainable. Our study rendered a simple but effective method to utilize CaC 2 as carbon source and may have broad applications such as adsorbents, anode materials for Li/Na-ion batteries.