Sustainable rose multiflora derived nitrogen/oxygen-enriched micro-/mesoporous carbon as a low-cost competitive electrode towards high-performance electrochemical supercapacitors

Abstract

Cost-efficient carbonaceous materials have been utilized extensively for advanced electrochemical supercapacitors. However, modest gravimetric/volumetric capacitances are the insuperable bottleneck in their practical applications. Herein, we develop a simple yet scalable method to fabricate low-cost micro-/mesoporous N/O-enriched carbon (NOC-K) by using natural rose multiflora as a precursor with KOH activation. The biomass-derived NOC-K is endowed with a large surface area of ∼1646.7 m2 g-1, micro-/mesoporosity with ∼61.3% microporosity, high surface wettability, and a high content of N (∼1.2 at%)/O (∼26.7 at%) species. When evaluated as an electroactive material for supercapacitors, the NOC-K electrode (5 mg cm-2) yields large gravimetric/volumetric specific capacitances of ∼340.0 F g-1 (∼238.0 F cm-3) at 0.5 A g-1, and even ∼200.0 F g-1 (∼140.0 F cm-3) at 5.0 A g-1, a low capacitance decay of ∼4.2% after 8200 consecutive cycles, and a striking specific energy of ∼8.3 W h kg-1 in aqueous KOH electrolyte, benefiting from its intrinsic structural and compositional superiorities. Moreover, a remarkable specific energy of ∼52.6 W h kg-1 and ∼96.6% capacitance retention over 6500 cycles for the NOC-K based symmetric cell are obtained with the organic electrolyte. More promisingly, the competitive NOC-K demonstrates enormous potential towards advanced supercapacitors both with aqueous and organic electrolytes as a sustainable electrode candidate.