Facile synthesis of bicontinuous microporous/mesoporous carbon foam with ultrahigh specific surface area for supercapacitor application

Hierarchical porous carbon material as a supercapacitor electrode material has attracted great attention from many researchers around the world. In this paper, a simple and efficient buried activation technique is introduced to prepare a high-specific-surface-area carbon foam (up to 3106.7 m(2) g(-1)), which possesses unique hierarchical porous structure composed of super-large macropores (0.5-5 mu m), bicontinuous large micropores (1.14 nm) and small mesopores (3.12 nm). The hierarchical porous structure allows the rapid ion transport within the electrode, which endows the carbon foam with excellent supercapacitor performances in both 1 mol L-1 KOH and 1 mol L-1 H2SO4 electrolytes. Very high specific capacitances of up to 364.2 F/g in KOH electrolyte and 413.6 F/g in H2SO4 electrolyte at a current density of 1 A/g are demonstrated for the present carbon foam. Such the as-prepared electrode is able to deliver extremely high energy densities of 72.84 Wh/kg and 82.72 Wh/kg at a power density of 600 W/kg in KOH and H2SO4 electrolytes, respectively. (C) 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.