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

Abstract 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 KMnO 4 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.