Sol-gel assisted chemical activation for nitrogen doped porous carbon

Chemical activation has been widely used to synthesize porous carbon materials due to its promising application on energy storages. To ensure the sufficient activation, heavily usage of activation agent is necessary, which is unsafe and uneconomical for massive production. Here a sol-gel assisted chemical activation strategy was proposed to synthesize nitrogen doped porous carbon material. The sol-gel process ensured the activation agent uniformly mixed with carbon precursors, which achieved sufficient activation at a quietly low consumption of activation agent. As synthesized carbon material possesses high specific surface area (2140 m2/g) and N, O content (5.42 at.% and 11.29 at.%). Electrochemical characterization shows that the material delivers a capacitance of 334 F/g in 1 M H2SO4 electrolyte. The sol-gel assisted chemical activation is a promising strategy to synthesize low-cost nitrogen doped porous carbon materials.