Designing
low-cost and sustainable electrode materials for energy
storage devices with large energy density and capacitance is still
a formidable challenge. Herein, a green, template-free, and facile
Fe-decorated porous carbon synthesis strategy derived from bamboo
was proposed. This strategy includes hydrothermal carbonization pretreatment,
which can tune the carbon morphology and dope iron elements in one
step, and a mild KHCO3 activation to improve porosity while
retaining the spherical morphology. The optimized Fe-decorated porous
carbon exhibited a high surface area (1509.5 m2 g–1) with a carbon sphere/nanosheet architecture, which is beneficial
for ion/electrolyte diffusion and increasing the accessibility between
the surface area and electrolyte ions. Moreover, the introduced Fe
oxides can provide extra pseudocapacitance, which comes from the reversible
faradaic reaction between Fe3+ and Fe2+. The
resulting carbon material presented a high capacitance of 467 F g–1 at 0.5 A g–1. The assembled KOH-based
symmetric supercapacitor displayed a superb cycling performance that
can output 99.8% of the initial capacitance after 5000 cycles, and
the Na2SO4-based device showed the maximum energy
density of 20.31 W h kg–1. Meanwhile, different
behaviors in different electrolytes were further analyzed. This work
demonstrated that the modification of hydrochar is an effective way
to convert biomass into high-performance electrode materials, which
has potential for advanced storage device applications.