Preparation and capacitive performance of porous carbon materials derived from eulaliopsis binata

In this work, we present a facile approach to synthesize porous carbon materials via a two-step fabrication process using eulaliopsis binata (EB) as the biomass precursor. The dried EB is directly subjected to pyrolysis at a moderate temperature (500 °C) followed by KOH activation at high temperature (850 °C), giving EB-derived porous carbons. By optimizing the KOH/carbon mass ratio and activation temperature to balance the porosity and capacitance, the resulting porous carbon shows an extremely high specific surface area (2273 m2 g−1) and pore volume (1.19 m3 g−1) as well as excellent capacitive performance with a specific capacitance of 373 F g−1 at 0.5 A g−1. Such low-cost, high-performance, biomass-derived electrode material is potentially useful for high-power supercapacitors.