Synthesis of biomass porous carbon materials from bean sprouts for hydrogen evolution reaction electrocatalysis and supercapacitor electrode

Abstract Biomass carbon porous materials have attracted more attention for their green, renewable and simple preparation process. They have a large specific surface area and abundant pore structure. Their structural characteristics make them expose more active sites and allow the electrolyte ions to transfer quickly, which indicates they have great application prospects in hydrogen evolution reaction (HER) and supercapacitors. In the present work, bean sprout (BS) was used as the carbon source because of its nitrogen self-doped characteristic and advantages of low-cost, simple, mature production process. The high temperature carbonization method without physical and/or chemical activation was used to synthesize the carbon materials. And different pyrolysis temperature (500–900 °C) was investigated in this work. The as-prepared BS-800 were used as the bifunctional electrode materials. The measurement results showed that BS-800 exhibited the high activity for HER and high specific capacitance for supercapacitors.