Microstructure modification strategies of coal‐derived carbon materials for electrochemical energy storage applications

Abstract Compared with other metal anodes such as lithium, sodium and potassium, carbon materials exhibit low redox potential, enhanced safety, significant low‐cost advantages and decent electrochemical performance for large‐scale metal‐ion batteries and supercapacitors. Among the various carbon precursors, low‐cost coal and coal derivatives are preferred due to their unique carbon structure with high carbon content. A variety of coal‐derived carbon materials have been constructed using different strategies and have been investigated for diverse electrochemical energy storage due to their specific microstructures. In the short term, the electrochemical performance of coal‐derived carbon materials is normal. However, it is imperative to develop low‐cost and high‐performance coal‐derived carbon materials in order to reduce the cost of energy storage systems. Therefore, this review focuses on the microstructure modulation strategies for coal‐based derived carbon materials to further enhance their electrochemical performance through heteroatom doping, defect engineering, interlayer engineering, crystallinity regulation, pore regulation and multi‐strategy synergy. In addition, this review summarizes the enhancement mechanisms for modification strategies and analyses their limitations. Furthermore, current challenges and future research directions for the development of high‐performance coal‐based derived carbon materials are proposed in this review. It is anticipated that through novel modification strategies, coal‐derived carbon materials will exhibit electrochemical performance comparable to that of carbon materials prepared from other precursors.