Coal-derived boron and phosphorus co-doped activated carbon with expanded interlayer space for high performance sodium ion capacitor anode

Aiming at the key problem of Na⁺ insertion difficulty and low charge transfer efficiency of activated carbon materials. It is an effective strategy to increase the lattice spacing and defect concentration by doping to reduce the ion diffusion resistance and improve the kinetics. Hence, anthracitic coal is used to prepare activated carbon (AC) and B,P-doped activated carbon (B,P-AC) as the cathode and anode materials for high-performance all-carbon SICs, respectively. AC cathode material has high specific surface area and reasonable micropore structure, which shows excellent capacitance performance. B,P-AC anode material has the advantages of extremely high specific surface area (1856.1 m²/g), expanded interlayer spacing (0.40 nm) and uniform distribution of B and P heteroatoms. Hence, B,P-AC anode achieves a highly reversible Na⁺ storage capacity of 243 mAh/g at a current density of 0.05 A/g. Density functional theory (DFT) calculations further verify that B,P-AC has stronger Na⁺ storage performance. The final assembled B,P-AC//AC SIC offers a high energy density of 109.78 Wh kg⁻¹ and a high-power density of 10.03 kW kg⁻¹. The high-performance coal-derived activated carbon of this work provides a variety of options for industrial production of electrode materials for sodium ion capacitors.