Economic prosperity of developing flixweed seeds-derived porous carbon for ultrahigh-performance supercapacitors

The fabrication of carbon materials with low cost and high performance is the main challenge in wide appli-cations of supercapacitors. In this work, facile carbonization and chemical activation processes are developed to convert flixweed seeds to hierarchical porous carbon with large specific surface area and self-doped ample heteroatoms (e.g., nitrogen, sulfur and oxygen). The obtained carbon material demonstrates several advantages in supercapacitors, such as ultrahigh specific capacitance of 662.4 F g-1 at 0.5 A g-1 and long cycling life > 12,000 cycles at 20 A g-1. A symmetric supercapacitor based on the resulting carbon delivers a high energy density of 34 W h kg-1 at 1000 W kg-1 in 1 M Na2SO4. Therefore, flixweed seeds can be economically utilized for large-scale production of porous carbon with excellent supercapacitance performance.

Automated summary

In this work, flixweed seeds are successfully converted into hierarchical porous carbon materials with large specific surface area and self-doped heteroatoms. The resulting carbon material shows excellent performance in supercapacitors, with high specific capacitance and long cycling life. A symmetric supercapacitor based on this carbon material also exhibits high energy density.