Puffing pretreatment for sorghum seed-derived porous carbon in optimized NiCo-LDH growth and superior supercapacitor performance
摘要
Nickel-cobalt layered double hydroxide (NiCo-LDH) is a promising supercapacitor material, but its performance is limited by nanosheet stacking and poor conductivity. Incorporating a porous carbon support is an effective strategy to overcome these issues. Herein, porous carbon derived from both puffed and unpuffed sorghum seeds was synthesized at various pre-carbonization temperatures. The optimized carbon from puffed seeds (PH-R4A7), abundant in pyridinic-N and oxygen groups, facilitates the uniform growth of NiCo-LDH. The resulting NiCo-LDH/PH-R4A7 composite delivers a high specific capacitance of 807.2 C g− 1 at 1 A g− 1 and excellent capacitance retention (69.9% at 20 A g− 1), surpassing both pristine NiCo-LDH and its unpuffed counterpart (NiCo-LDH/PC-R4A7). Furthermore, an asymmetric supercapacitor (NiCo-LDH/PH-R4A7//PH-R6A7) achieves a high energy density of 85.1 Wh kg− 1 at a power density of 799.9 W kg− 1, along with outstanding cycling stability (88.4% capacitance retention after 10,000 cycles). This work demonstrates that puffing pretreatment is an important strategy for enhancing the structural and electrochemical properties of NiCo-LDH/porous carbon composites.