Easily Prepared Wood–Derived Hierarchically Porous Carbon for High–Performance Supercapacitors.

Hierarchical porous carbon exhibits enormous application potential in the field of energy storage. In this paper, we develop a facile method to prepare hierarchical porous carbon (HPC) derived from wood powder and using KMnO4 as the activator. The optimized HPC‐600 samples possess the large specific surface area with hierarchical porous structure and massive oxygen–containing functional groups. The HPC‐600 electrode shows a specific capacitance of 362.7 F g−1 at 0.5 A g−1 and a capacitance retention of 101.5 % after 10, 000 cycles. In addition, the assembled HPC‐600//HPC‐600 symmetric supercapacitor delivers an energy density of 18.4 Wh kg−1 at a power density of 600 W kg−1. This paper provides a new and convenient method for the preparation of hierarchical porous carbon for high performance supercapacitor. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]