A tunable hierarchical porous carbon from starch pretreated by calcium acetate for high performance supercapacitors

Abstract

Hierarchical porous carbons (HPCs) with abundant mesopores have been prepared by a facile route from the starch that was pretreated by calcium acetate. The scanning electron microscopy (SEM), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), X-ray diffraction (XRD), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS), Raman spectroscopy, and N₂ adsorption–desorption tests show that hierarchical porous carbons with bimodal mesopores have been obtained. Moreover, the pore sizes are tunable by simply adjusting the reactants ratio and carbonization temperature. The as-synthesized hierarchical porous carbon materials (HPCs-2-800) possesses the highest Brunauer-Emmett-Teller (BET)-specific surface area of 464 m² g⁻¹ and mesoporous volume of 0.663 cm³ g⁻¹ at the carbonization temperature of 800 °C and starch to calcium acetate mass ratio of 2. Electrochemical measurements also display that the HPCs-2-800 electrodes have a high reversible capacity of 244 F g⁻¹ at the current density of 0.1 A g⁻¹ and 182 F g⁻¹ at the current density of 10 A g⁻¹. When the current density is elevated from 0.1 to 10 A g⁻¹, the high capacitance retention of 74.6 % reveals a good rate performance. Long charge–discharge cycling measurements disclose good stabilities over 25,000 cycles at different current densities of 1–10 A g⁻¹ (5000 cycles at each current density) for HPCs-2-800 electrode. The cycling results indicate a high capacitance retention of 99.6 % over 5000 charge–discharge cycles even at the current density of 10 A g⁻¹. The excellent supercapacitive performances imply that HPCs-2-800 is a promising candidate for supercapacitors.