One-Step Carbonization Synthesis of Hollow Carbon Nanococoons with Multimodal Pores and Their Enhanced Electrochemical Performance for Supercapacitors

Hollow carbon capsules with multimodal pores are highly promising for developing novel electrode materials for high-performance electrochemical devices due to their more active sites for ion and electron transfer. However, at present, most of the previous efforts are focused on the multistep process for the synthesis of hollow carbon nanostructures with individual pores. Herein, hollow carbon nanococoons (HCNCs) with non-spherical cavity and multimodal hierarchical pores have been facilely synthesized via a one-step carbonization of a Fe₂O₃/carbon precursor core/shell nanospindle at 850 °C. We interestingly found that during the carbonization, Fe₂O₃ was automatically “escaped” from the inside nanospindle, leading to the formation of new HCNCs. Most importantly, the spindle-shaped cavity of the obtained HCNCs with high conductivity can offer a multimodal ion diffusion pathway, which can facilitate the reaction kinetics in a supercapacitor. As a result, the HCNCs-based supacapacitor exhibits the capacitance of 220.0 F g^–1 at a given scan rate of 5 mV s^–1, 3.5 times higher than that of hollow carbon spheres, high stability with 98% of the initial capacity maintained even after 1000 cycles, and high rate capability. This work provides a new and facile avenue for enhancing performance of a HCNCs-based supercapacitor by using the non-spherical hollow structures with multimodal pores.