Sorghum biomass-derived porous carbon electrodes for capacitive deionization and energy storage

Biomass-derived carbons are widely studied as cost-effective and high-performance energy storage materials due to their high specific surface area, abundance, and facile synthetic methods. Through widespread research, a number of strategies can be implemented to maximize specific capacitance and power. Among the different approaches to improve the energy storage performance of biomass-derived carbons, an increase of specific surface area and the introduction of heteroatom doping are usually effective strategies. As such, in this study, we utilize sorghum stem biomass to obtain porous carbonaceous forms, and subsequent KOH activation to increase the porosity and surface area. The resulting activated sorghum stem-derived porous carbon materials exhibit significantly higher specific capacitance compared to their pre-activated carbon. Capacitive deionization (CDI) that is used to deionize water is also studied to demonstrate the versatility of sorghum stem-derived porous carbon. A similar performance trend is observed for both supercapacitor and CDI for all carbon samples because both applications exploit the electrostatic double-layer capacitance behavior of carbon materials.

Automated summary

Biomass-derived carbons are widely studied as cost-effective energy storage materials with high performance due to their high specific surface area and the effectiveness of strategies like increasing surface area and introducing heteroatom doping. Porous carbon materials derived from sorghum stem show significantly higher specific capacitance after KOH activation, demonstrating their versatility in applications like capacitive deionization. The performance trend observed in both supercapacitors and CDI for all carbon samples is consistent due to the exploitation of carbon material's electrostatic double-layer capacitance behavior.