Bamboo-derived carbon material inherently doped with SiC and nitrogen for flexible supercapacitors

It is still challenging to prepare porous carbon materials following a facile, green and universal sacrificial template method from renewable biomass. For this purpose, bio-renewable bamboo is a natural silicon reservoir containing a significant amount of inherent silica that can act as a natural sacrificial template for the formation of porous carbon materials as well as a dopant. Herein, we firstly report the SiC/N dual doped bio-renewable carbon material via a facile, natural sacrificial template method. In this newly developed method, the inherently available SiO2 nanoparticles have been utilized as the natural sacrificial template for creating the multi-porous architecture as well as for the generation of structural defects in the form of SiC nano-species. Additionally, the inherent nitrogen functional groups give rise to the formation of only pyrrolic-N species after pyrolysis. Furthermore, dual doping of SiC and pyrrolic-N species stimulate the faradaic redox reaction during the charge/discharge process and further increase the rate capability at higher current density with excellent electrochemical stability. Hence, the synergistic effect of SiC and N-pyrrolic dually doped carbon network gives rise to the formation of promising electrode material towards supercapacitors. Benefiting from the above unique features, the supercapacitor with the SNAC-1 electrode material delivers excellent capacitive behavior (369 F g−1 at 0.5 A g−1) in 1 M H2SO4 electrolyte with 100% capacitance retention after 5000 charge–discharge cycles. More prominently, the all-solid state, symmetric supercapacitors assembled by SNAC-1 show outstanding capacitance of 162 F g−1 at 0.5 A g−1 and reveal high energy density (∼5.41 W h kg−1 at 0.5 kW kg−1 power density) and excellent cyclic stability. This work provides an ideal sustainable solution from bamboo source to prepare porous SiC/N composites for cost-effective supercapacitor’s electrode materials.