A novel porous carbon material derived from the byproducts of bean curd stick manufacture for high-performance supercapacitor use

• Published in: RSC advances 2018-01, Vol.8 (7), p.39937-39947
• Main Authors: Shi, Lulu, Jin, Lihua, Meng, Zheng, Sun, Yanan, Li, Cong, Shen, Yehua
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Byproducts; Capacitance; Carbon; Chemistry; Energy sources; Flux density; Porous materials; Supercapacitors
• ISSN: 2046-2069; 2046-2069
• DOI: 10.1039/c8ra08664h

The exploitation of efficient renewable energy resources and the promotion of added value of agricultural products are always hot topics. In this study, we present a novel porous carbon material for high performance supercapacitor applications made from the byproduct of bean curd stick manufacture. The as-prepared carbon material possesses a hollow interconnected structure with a large specific surface area (2609 m 2 g −1 ), while containing 5.01% oxygen and 1.75% nitrogen heteroatoms. Therefore, besides electrical double-layer capacitance, it can also produce additional pseudocapacitance to enhance the overall capacitance. Benefiting from these advantages of structure and composition, the bean curd stick based porous carbon material demonstrates a high specific capacitance of 405 F g −1 at 0.5 A g −1 . Moreover, the presented porous carbon material based symmetric supercapacitor also offers a high energy density (11.35 W h kg −1 at a power density of 125 W kg −1 ). All the above findings indicate that the byproduct of bean curd stick manufacture is an excellent optional material for preparing high-performance supercapacitor material. Simultaneously, this work also provides an effective strategy for adding value to agricultural products. Preparation of heteroatom-functionalized porous carbon derived from byproducts of bean curd stick manufacture as an electrode material for high performance supercapacitors.