Sustainable hierarchical porous carbon aerogel from cellulose for high performance supercapacitor and CO2 capture
Abstract Fabrication of cost effective and eco friendly hierarchical porous carbons from the most abundant and widely available biomass cellulose represents a critical and sustainable way to solve the crisis of fossil resources. In this work, a hierarchical porous carbon aerogel with desirable macropores, mesopores, and micropores was obtained via dissolving gelling and subsequent carbonizing activating process. The CO2 activated carbon aerogel had a high specific surface area of 1364 m2/g and a high specific capacitance of 328 F g 1 (0.5 A g 1, 1.0 M H2SO4) as well as an outstanding cycling stability with 96% of the capacitance retention after 5000 charge/discharge cycles. More importantly, for the first time, we demonstrated that the cellulose derived hierarchical porous carbon aerogel showed a good CO2 adsorption capacity of 3.42 mmol/g (at 1 atm and 298 K) which indicates the possibility of using this carbon aerogel for CO2 capture.