Development of the Self-doping Porous Carbon and Its Application in Supercapacitor Electrode

The massive discharge of biomass wastes not only causes waste of resources, but also pollutes the environment. Therefore, converting biomass wastes into carbon materials is an effective way to solve the above problems. Here, using biomass waste pig nails as raw materials and K₂CO₃ as chemical activators, the N-doped porous carbon(KPNC) is prepared by direct pyrolysis. As an electrode for supercapacitors, the electrochemical tests of KPNCs showed that they exhibited good electrochemical performance and excellent cycling stability. When the current density is 0.2 A/g, the specific capacitance is up to 344.6 F/g. Moreover, it still maintains 97.6% initial capacitance retention after 2000 cycles at a high current density of 5 A/g. Above exceptional electrochemical performances may be ascribed to an appropriate porous structure(S_micro/S_total=80.31%, V_micro/V_total=76.19%), high nitrogen contents(4.44%, atomic fraction), oxygen contents(9.13%, atomic fraction) as well as small internal resistance. The above experimental results show that the conversion of pig nails to porous carbon can reduce the waste of resources and alleviate environmental pollution.