Facile preparation of highly porous carbon from bean dregs for enhanced electrochemical performance

Abstract

In this work, we propose a cost-effective method to convert bean dregs to high-performance porous carbon as supercapacitor electrode materials. We implement an activation process with KOH to induce well-developed porous structure to achieve a high specific surface area (up to 3104 m2 g-1 ) and high specific capacitance (up to 268 F g-1 ), indicating superior electrochemical properties. We also investigate how the key parameters, in terms of activation temperature, time and ratio, determine the pore structures and electrochemical properties. In addition, the porous carbon produced from our method may serve great potential for multi-disciplined fields such as separation, catalysis and hydrogen storage.