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A facile synthesis of nitrogen-doped hierarchical porous carbon with hollow sphere structure for high-performance supercapacitors

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Abstract

In this work, nitrogen-doped carbon with hierarchical porous and hollow sphere structure has been synthesized through a simple and facile route of spray drying using glycine as the nitrogen-containing carbon source. After KOH activation, the prepared material (NHPCA) shows a large specific surface area of 962 m2 g−1 with moderate N-doping of 5.74% and exhibits a high specific capacitance of 271 F g−1 in 6 M KOH electrolyte at 1.0 A g−1, remarkable rate capability and particularly stable cycling performance with no significant specific capacitance drop after 10000 cycles at 1.0 A g−1. The excellent electrochemical properties come from the unique structure and the doping of nitrogen. The hierarchical pore structure improves the efficiency of electrolyte ions transport, and diffusion and the hollow sphere structure further facilitates mass transport. The doping of nitrogen increases the total capacitance by providing redox pseudo-capacitance. The results indicate the as-prepared nitrogen-doped carbon with hierarchical porous and hollow sphere structure can be used as a hopeful candidate for an efficient electrode of commercial supercapacitors devices.

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Acknowledgements

This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China, NSFC (51772205, 51572192, 51772208, 51472179), and the General Program of Municipal Natural Science Foundation of Tianjin (17JCYBJC17000, 17JCYBJC22700).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Materials Science and Engineering, Key Laboratory of Advanced Ceramics and Machining Technology of Ministry of Education, Tianjin University, Tianjin, 300072, People’s Republic of China

    Yunpeng Shang, Xudong Hu, Xin Li, Shu Cai & Xiaohong Sun

  2. State Key Laboratory of Hollow-Fiber Membrane Materials and Membrane Processes, School of Environmental and Chemical Engineering, Tianjin Polytechnic University, Tianjin, 300387, People’s Republic of China

    Chunming Zheng

  3. Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, University of California, Santa Barbara, Santa Barbara, CA, 93106, USA

    Xudong Hu, Xin Li, Chunming Zheng & Xiaohong Sun

  4. Institute of Power Source and Ecomaterials Science, Hebei University of Technology, Tianjin, 300130, People’s Republic of China

    Guangchuan Liang

  5. CAS Key Laboratory of Green Process and Engineering, Institute of Process Engineering, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100190, People’s Republic of China

    Junmei Zhao

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  1. Yunpeng Shang
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Shang, Y., Hu, X., Li, X. et al. A facile synthesis of nitrogen-doped hierarchical porous carbon with hollow sphere structure for high-performance supercapacitors. J Mater Sci 54, 12747–12757 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10853-019-03744-w

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