Preparation of activated carbon from willow leaves and evaluation in electric double-layer capacitors.

In this paper, willow leaves were used to prepare activated carbons (ACs) by one-step pyrolysis with ZnCl 2 activation. The as-prepared AC-1-800 exhibits porous structure with high specific surface area of 1031 m 2 g −1 and a large pore volume of 0.66 cm 3 g −1 . As a supercapacitor electrode, it shows a good capacitive performance in 6 M of KOH aqueous electrolyte, such as the specific capacitance reaches 216 F g −1 at a current density of 0.1 A g −1 and the retention of specific capacitance is 97% after 1000 cycles at 2 A g −1 . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]