Carbon microfibers with hierarchical porous structure from electrospun fiber-like natural biopolymer.
Electrospinning offers a powerful route for building one-dimensional (1D) micro/nanostructures, but a common requirement for toxic or corrosive organic solvents during the preparation of precursor solution has limited their large scale synthesis and broad applications. Here we report a facile and low-cost way to prepare 1D porous carbon microfibers by using an electrospun fiber-like natural product, i.e., silk cocoon, as precursor. We surprisingly found that by utilizing a simple carbonization treatment, the cocoon microfiber can be directly transformed into 1D carbon microfiber of ca. 6 μm diameter with a unique three-dimensional porous network structure composed of interconnected carbon nanoparticles of 10~40 nm diameter. We further showed that the as-prepared carbon product presents superior electrochemical performance as binder-free electrodes of supercapacitors and good adsorption property toward organic vapor.
Materials Science Institute, PCFM Lab and DSAPM Lab, School of Chemistry and Chemical Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou 510275, P R China.
Yeru
Y
Liang
Dingcai
D
Wu
Ruowen
R
Fu