Biomass-derived Nitrogen-doped Porous Carbons (NPC) and NPC/ Polyaniline Composites as High Performance Supercapacitor Materials

Xizhi Wang #

Xiaofei Zeng #

Dapeng Cao Email

State Key Laboratory of Organic-Inorganic Composites, and Beijing Advanced Innovation Center for Soft Matter Science and Engineering, Beijing University of Chemical Technology, Beijing 100029, China

#These authors contributed equally to this work

Abstract

Currently, developing high performance supercapacitor material suitable for application in the areas, which require high energy density battery, is still a great challenge. Here, we use biomass poplar sawdust as precursors to prepare nitrogen-doped porous carbons (NPC) and the NPC/polyaniline (PANI) composites, and further explore its application in supercapacitor electrodes. By optimizing the carbonization temperature, we find the NPC-750 sample shows a highest specific capacitance of 362 F∙g-1 in 6 M KOH at 0.5 A∙g-1 among the four samples, due to its large specific surface area of 2149 m2·g-1, and suitable pore size distribution and high graphitization degree. Further investigations indicate that NPC/PANI composite exhibits a much higher specific capacitance of 312 F∙g-1 than 252 F∙g-1 of NPC at 5 A∙g-1, and a wider voltage range of 0-1.4 V than the one of 0-1V of NPC, as well as a much higher energy density of 15.45 Wh∙kg−1, which is 2.73 times of 5.66 Wh∙kg−1 of NPC. This work indicates that integrating porous carbon and PANI into a composite is a promising strategy for developing high performance supercapacitor electrode materials.

Biomass-derived Nitrogen-doped Porous Carbons (NPC) and NPC/ Polyaniline Composites as High Performance Supercapacitor Materials