Mass fabrication of oxygen and nitrogen co-doped 3D hierarchical porous carbon nanosheets by an explosion-assisted strategy for supercapacitor and dye adsorption application

Abstract The mass fabrication of heteroatom-doped 3D hierarchical porous carbon nanosheets plays an important role in developing high-performance supercapacitor electrode materials and dye adsorbent. In this work, a simple and feasible explosion-assisted strategy was proposed, in which only glucose and magnesium nitrate were used as a reactant to fabricate a series of heteroatom-doped 3D hierarchical porous carbon nanosheets (HPCNS) on a large scale. The obtained HPCNS-1.0 possesses abundant porous structure as well as an ultrahigh oxygen content (16.08 at. %) and an outstanding specific surface area (SSA, 1378 m2 g−1). As an active electrode material, the specific capacitance for HPCNS-1.0 is 253 F g−1 at the current density of 1 A g−1 and 168 F g−1 at 20 A g−1, demonstrating its high rate capability (66%). The specific capacitance only loses 1.3% after 5000 cycles at 10 A g−1, indicating its outstanding cycle stability. As an adsorbent for dye adsorption, the HPCNS-1.0 shows good adsorption capability towards various types of dyes, especially methylene blue with the uptake of 561 mg g−1 at 25 °C. Our work provides a cheap and efficient way to develop high performance 3D hierarchical porous heteroatom-doped carbon nanosheets on a large scale.