Prolifera-Green-Tide as Sustainable Source for Carbonaceous Aerogels with Hierarchical Pore to Achieve Multiple Energy Storage

The increasing demand for efficient energy storage and conversion devices has aroused great interest in designing advanced materials with high specific surface areas, multiple holes, and good conductivity. Here, we report a new method for fabricating a hierarchical porous carbonaceous aerogel (HPCA) from renewable seaweed aerogel. The HPCA possesses high specific surface area of 2200 m 2 g −1 and multilevel micro/meso/macropore structures. These important features make HPCA exhibit a reversible lithium storage capacity of 827.1 mAh g −1 at the current density of 0.1 A g −1 , which is the highest capacity for all the previously reported nonheteroatom-doped carbon nanomaterials. It also shows high specific capacitance and excellent rate performance for electric double layer capacitors (260.6 F g −1 at 1 A g −1 and 190.0 F g −1 at 50 A g −1 ), and long cycle life with 91.7% capacitance retention after 10 000 cycles at 10 A g −1 . The HPCA also can be used as support to assemble Co 3 O 4 nanowires (Co 3 O 4 @HPCA) for constructing a high performance pseudocapacitor with the maximum specific capacitance of 1167.6 F g −1 at the current density of 1 A g −1 . The present work highlights the first example in using prolifera-green-tide as a sustainable source for developing advanced carbon porous aerogels to achieve multiple energy storage.