Design and synthesis of three-dimensional hierarchical ordered porous carbons for supercapacitors

Three-dimensional hierarchical ordered porous carbons (3D HOPCs) have been successfully prepared through templating method using silica sphere nano-array as a hard template, triblock copolymer P123 as a soft template and sucrose as a carbon source, and used as the electrode materials for supercapacitors. The structure, morphology and physicochemical properties of the as-prepared 3D HOPCs are characterized by nitrogen adsorption-desorption isotherm, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and cyclic voltammetry (CV), galvanostatic charge-discharge (GCD) tests, and cycle life measurements. The results show that the 3D HOPCs possess well-interconnected 3D hierarchical ordered porous structure. Especially, the 3D HOPC-80, of which the pore size is 4.01 nm, shows the specific surface area of 1182m2 g (1) and a specific capacitance of 247 F g (1) at the current density of 1 A g (1). Besides, the supercapacitors based on 3D HOPCs exhibit excellent rate performance, high energy densities of 7.5Wh kg (1) and 5.8Wh kg (1) at the power densities of 500Wkg (1) and 10000Wkg (1), respectively. Moreover, the supercapacitors using 3D HOPCs as electrode materials hold high capacitance retentions over 91% even after 10000 cycles. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.