Large-scale fabrication of N-doped porous carbon nanosheets for dye adsorption and supercapacitor applications

Abstract

The development of novel large-scale synthesis protocols for heteroatom-doped porous carbon nanosheets is highly imperative for wastewater purification and high-performance electrode materials. In the present work, we propose a simple and feasible explosion-assisted activation strategy to fabricate a kind of N-doped porous carbon nanosheet (N-PCNS) at a large scale, in which only lactose and zinc nitrate were used as raw materials. The obtained N-PCNS possesses hierarchical micro- and mesopore nanostructures with a high specific surface area of 879 m² g⁻¹ while keeping a high nitrogen content of 3.73 at%. The adsorption properties of the N-PCNS were systematically evaluated through adsorption of neutral red (NR) dye. The adsorption capacity of the N-PCNS was as high as 439.6 mg g⁻¹, meanwhile the adsorption process exhibited fine correlation with the Langmuir isotherm and pseudo-second-order kinetic models. As an electrode material for supercapacitors, the specific capacitance of the N-PCNS is up to 263 F g⁻¹ at 1 A g⁻¹ and 194 F g⁻¹ at 20 A g⁻¹, revealing superior rate performance. The capacitance retention after 10 000 cycles at 20 A g⁻¹ is 96%, demonstrating excellent cycling stability. Our work provides an effective approach to achieve the large-scale preparation of high-performance doped carbon materials.