Natural nanomaterial as hard template for scalable synthesizing holey carbon naonsheet/nanotube with in-plane and out-of-plane pores for electrochemical energy storage

Tuning porous structure of carbon nanomaterials has been found to be important for their performance enhancement in electrochemical energy storage applications. In this work we employed a natural nanomaterial kaolinite, which is abundant and cheap, as hard template to synthesis porous carbon nanomaterial. By tuning the structure of hard template kaolinite, we have achieved a template directed formation of holey carbon nanosheet/nanotube materials. This carbon nanomaterials with hierarchical in-plane and out-of-plane pores have shown electrochemical energy storage capacity of 286 F/g (equal to 314 F/cm³) at 0.1 A/g and 85 F/g (equal to 93 F/cm³) at 100 A/g, which is comparable to variety of reported carbon based electrochemical energy storage electrode materials.