Facile Method for Preparation of Porous Carbon Derived from Biomass for High Performance Supercapacitors

A facile method is adopted to obtain three-dimensional porous carbonaceous material from biomass (fish seed) by pyrolysis and activation. The three-dimensional porous carbonaceous material is then fabricated as electrodes for a supercapacitor. Owing to fish seed being rich in elemental oxygen and nitrogen, the heteroatoms can introduce a pseudo-capacitance without doping. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) analysis results show that the three-dimensional porous carbonaceous material exhibits an interconnected porous structure, which consists of micropores, mesopores and macropores. Adsorptiondesorption measurements determine that its surface area is 3232 m(2).g(-1). Electrochemical measurements show that the biomass-derived porous carbon material displays a relatively high specific capacitance of 350 F.g(-1) at 0.5 A.g(-1) and an initial capacitance retention of 90.9% after 10,000 cycles in a threeelectrode system, where KOH (6 M) is used as the electrolyte. In addition, the porous carbon material is also tested in a two-electrode system and exhibits a specific capacitance of 250 F.g(-1) at 1 .g(-1), and the specific capacitance retention reaches 94% after 10,000 cycles at 10 A.g(-1). Furthermore, the energy density of the supercapacitor is approximately 8.68 Wh.kg(-1) at a power density of 125 W.kg(-1) in the two-electrode system.