Porous Cotton-derived Carbon: Synthesis, Microstructure and Supercapacitive Performance

Abstract

Biomass materials were widely used to synthesize porous carbon for energy storages considering the simple preparation method and wide availability of raw materials. Herein, we prepared nitrogen doped porous carbon from natural cotton via a simple one-step eco-friendly method. The cotton-derived carbon material delivers a maximum specific surface area of 480 m2/g and a high nitrogen content of 6.84% at the carbonization temperature of 750℃. The obtained material shows excellent performance when used as supercapacitor electrode materials, which exhibits a maximal specific capacitance of 252 F/g at 1 A/g in 1 mol/L H2SO4 electrolyte and retains 94% of the capacitance after 10, 000 cycles at 15 A/g. The good performance of the low-cost carbon electrode made from cotton provides a potential application for electrochemical capacitors.