Easily Prepared Wood-Derived Hierarchically Porous Carbon for High-Performance Supercapacitors

Hierarchical porous carbon exhibits enormous application potential in the field of energy storage. In this paper, we develop a facile method to prepare hierarchical porous carbon (HPC) derived from wood powder and using KMnO4 as the activator. The optimized HPC-600 samples possess the large specific surface area with hierarchical porous structure and massive oxygen-containing functional groups. The HPC-600 electrode shows a specific capacitance of 362.7 F g(-1) at 0.5 A g(-1) and a capacitance retention of 101.5 % after 10, 000 cycles. In addition, the assembled HPC-600//HPC-600 symmetric supercapacitor delivers an energy density of 18.4 Wh kg(-1) at a power density of 600 W kg(-1). This paper provides a new and convenient method for the preparation of hierarchical porous carbon for high performance supercapacitor.