Platanus occidentalis L. fruit-derived carbon materials for electrochemical potassium storage

Abstract In the post-lithium-ion battery era, potassium-ion batteries (PIBs) have been considered as a promising candidate because of their electrochemical and economic characteristics. However, as an emerging electrochemical storage technology, it is urgent to develop capable anode materials that can be produced at low cost and on a large scale to promote its practical application. Biomass-derived carbon materials as anodes of PIBs exhibit strong competitiveness by their merits of low weight, high stability, non-toxicity, and wide availability. In this work, we employed Platanus occidentalis L. fruits as a precursor to prepare a series of biomass-derived carbon materials by simply adjusting carbonization temperature, and we explored their electrochemical potassium storage capability as anode materials. The optimized sample (annealed at 800 °C) delivered good potassium storage capability (193.3 mAh g−1 at 100 mA g−1 after 100 cycles), cycling stability (80.4 mAh g−1 after 300 cycles at 300 mA g−1), and rate performance (51.2 mAh g−1 at 1000 mA g−1). This work demonstrates a feasible way to utilize biomass waste disposal for emerging sustainable energy storage technologies.