Making Waste Profitable: Yak Dung Derived Carbon for High-Performance Supercapacitors

Abstract

With the continuous increase in the demand for energy storage equipment, it is imperative to develop new electrode materials with high specific capacitance. In this study, yak dung derived carbon materials (N-YD) were prepared by a simple, economical, and effective method, and it was applied as a supercapacitor electrode material. The N-YD-800 material exhibited high nitrogen content, as well as a large number of multipore structures, which were beneficial to improve the capacitance performance. N-YD-800 exhibited an excellent specific capacitance (346.3[Formula: see text]F[Formula: see text]g[Formula: see text] at 1[Formula: see text]A[Formula: see text]g[Formula: see text], good rate performance (56.6% from 0.5[Formula: see text]A[Formula: see text]g[Formula: see text] to 10[Formula: see text]A[Formula: see text]g[Formula: see text], and excellent cycling stability (93.3% after 5000 cycles). This study provided a new method for the treatment of livestock and poultry manure resources, affording a cost-effective, easy-to-use carbon source to solve the problem of nonrenewable energy.