Activated Carbon by One-Step Calcination of Deoxygenated Agar for High Voltage Lithium Ion Supercapacitor

Hybrid lithium-ion supercapacitors combine advantages of both the high power density of capacitors and the high energy density of lithium batteries, where activated carbon serves as a critical cathode material with an electric double-layer capacitance charge storage mechanism. Here, we have demon-strated that a new activated carbon, which was prepared by the calcination of deoxygenated agar, can greatly enhance the specific energy of the hybrid lithium-ion supercapacitor, assembling with a multilayer protected-lithium anode and 21 m LITFSI water-in-salt electrolyte. The obtained carbon material has a suitable pore volume and narrow pore-size distribution and shows a high specific surface area up to 1672 m(2) g(-1) and a high specific capacitance of 210.4 F g(AC)(-1) in water-in-salt electrolyte. The assembled hybrid lithium-ion supercapacitor shows a high specific energy of 308.3 W h kg(AC)(-1) at a specific power of 0.7 kW kg(AC)(-1). In addition, it presents an encouraging 89% retention of the initial specific energy after 8000 charge/discharge cycles. The improvement can be attributed to the high surface area of the carbon material and its narrow pore-size distribution, the wide operation potential window of water-in-salt electrolyte, and the high cell working voltage by using protected-lithium anode.