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Engineering Advances

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ArticleOpen Access http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/ea.2025.10.018

Design and Fabrication of High-performance Capacitors Based on Porous Carbon Materials

Huiyan Zhou1,#, Fengnian You1,#, Gengrui Chen1,#, Jun Zhou1,*, Mengsi Wu2,*

1Wuhan Jingkai Foreign Language School, Wuhan 430118, Hubei, China.

2Borne Optical (Huizhou) Co., Ltd., Huizhou 518122, Guangdong, China.

#These authors contributed equally to this study.

*Corresponding author: Jun Zhou, Mengsi Wu

Published: December 26,2025

Abstract

Porous carbon materials are extensively utilized in electrochemical double-layer capacitors (EDLC) thanks to their significant surface area, remarkable electrical conductivity, excellent structural integrity, and affordability. However, the synthesis of carbon materials with heteroatom doping and hierarchical porous structures at low energy consumption and high efficiency remains a significant challenge. This paper reports a neoteric approach for the successful preparation of hierarchical porous carbon nanospheres (HPC) through hydrothermal carbonization of natural glucose followed by activation with KOH. The as-prepared HPC materials exhibit a maximum specific surface area of 998.01 m²/g and distributions of pore size in the ranges of 1.2-2.07 nm and 2.4-3.64 nm. The activated carbon nanospheres demonstrate capacitance of 246.6 F/g (current density of 0.5 A/g), along with excellent high-rate performance (retaining 81.9% of capacitance of 20 A/g) and good cycling stability (after 6000 cycles, the capacitance retention rate is close to 80.8%). This highly conductive porous carbon nanosphere material, characterized by hierarchical porosity and heteroatom doping, holds promise as a potential material candidate in the field of EDLC.

Keywords

Electric double-layer capacitors; Hierarchical porous carbon nanospheres; Heteroatom doping; Capacitance

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How to cite this paper

Design and Fabrication of High-performance Capacitors Based on Porous Carbon Materials

How to cite this paper: Huiyan Zhou, Fengnian You, Gengrui Chen, Jun Zhou, Mengsi Wu. (2025). Design and Fabrication of High-performance Capacitors Based on Porous Carbon Materials. Engineering Advances5(4), 235-242.

DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.26855/ea.2025.10.018