A simple Mg(OH)2-assisted template carbonization method to N-doped nanoporous carbon material from phenidone and the capacitive improvement with the addition of azobisformamide

Abstract In this study, we present a simple but efficient template carbonization method to prepare nitrogen-doped nanoporous carbon material, in which phenidone acts as carbon/nitrogen sources and Mg(OH)2 as hard template. The results indicate that the carbon-1:1 sample is highly disordered with large BET surface area of 1513 m2 g−1, high pore volume of 2.2 cm3 g−1 and nitrogen content of 3.78%. As a result, it exhibits decent electrochemical behaviors, whose specific capacitance reaches up to 202.0 F g−1 when measured at 1  A g−1 in a three-electrode system. Moreover, azodicarbonamide has been introduced in the process of carbonization to further tailor the porosity of nanoporous carbon, named as the carbon-1:1:1 sample. In consequence, its BET surface area has decreased to be 1261 m2 g−1 but the pore volume increased up to 2.8 cm3 g−1, together with the large enhancement of nitrogen content up to 7.05%. Besides, it thus delivers a higher specific capacitance of 281.0 F g−1 at 1 A g−1, mostly due to the incremental content of nitrogen species. The proposed Mg(OH)2-assisted template carbonization method has provided an intriguing synthesis approach for N-doped nanoporous carbons, especially the nitrogen improvement simply by the addition of azodicarbonamide.