A Facile and Low-Cost Route to Heteroatom Doped Porous Carbon Derived from Broussonetia Papyrifera Bark with Excellent Supercapacitance and CO2 Capture Performance

In this work, we present a facile and low-cost approach to synthesize heteroatom doped porous carbon via hydrothermal treatment of stem bark of broussonetia papyrifera (BP) as the biomass precursor in diluted sulfuric acid, and following thermal activation by KOH at 800 °C. The morphology, structure and textural property of the prepared porous carbon (PC) are investigated by scanning electron microscopy, transmission electron microscopy, N 2 sorption isotherms, and X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy. The porous carbon possesses a high BET surface area of 1759 m 2 g −1 and an average pore size of 3.11 nm as well as hetero-oxygen (9.09%) and nitrogen (1.7%) doping. Such porous carbon shows outstanding capacitive performances of 416 F g −1 and 300 F g −1 in three and two-electrode systems, respectively. As a solid-state adsorbent, the obtained porous carbon has an excellent CO 2 adsorption capacity at ambient pressures of up to 6.71 and 4.45 mmol g −1 at 0 and 25 °C, respectively. The results present one novel precursor-synthesis route for facile large-scale production of high performance porous carbon for a variety of great applications including energy storage and CO 2 capture.