N, O co-doped porous carbon with rich pseudocapacitive groups exhibiting superior energy density in an acidic 2.4 V Li2SO4 electrolyte

Designing a carbon material with a unique composition and surface functional groups for offering high specific capacity in a wide voltage window is of great significance to improve the energy density for the supercapacitor in a cheap and eco-friendly aqueous electrolyte. Herein, we develop an efficient strategy to synthesize a N, O co-doped hierarchically porous carbon (NODPC-1.0) with moderate specific surface area and pore volume as well as rich heteroatoms using a deep eutectic solvent (DES) as an activator. It is found that NODPC-1.0 with a large proportion of pseudocapacitive functional groups (pyrrole-N, pyridine-N and carbonyl-quinone) can work stable in an acidic 2 mol/L Li2SO4 (pH 2.5) electrolyte, exhibiting specific capacities of 375 and 186 F/g at the current densities of 1.0 and 100 A/g, respectively. Also, the assembled symmetric capacitor using the NODPC-1.0 as the active material and 2 mol/L acidic Li2SO4 (pH 2.5) as the electrolyte shows an outstanding energy density of 74.4 Wh/kg at a high power density of 1.44 kW/kg under a broad voltage window (2.4 V). Relevant comparative experiments indicate that H+ of the acidic aqueous electrolyte plays a crucial part in enhancement the specific capacity, and the abundant pseudocapacitive functional groups on the surface of the NODPC-1.0 sample play the key role in the improvement of electrochemical cycle stability under a broad voltage window.