Highly conductive biocarbon nanostructures from burlap waste as sustainable additives for supercapacitor electrodes

Abstract

Biocarbon materials with high electrical conductivity have received great attention in many applications such as energy storage/conversion, EMI shielding and electrical/electronic components. We have successfully synthesized biocarbon nanostructures from waste burlap using a two-step thermochemical conversion process involving carbonization at 600 °C followed by graphitization at 1200 °C with an iron nitrate catalyst. The resulting material exhibited an extremely high electrical conductivity of 375 S m⁻¹, which is 15 times higher than those of commercial-grade graphene and carbon black. The high electrical conductivity was mainly due to the formation of a few layers (3–12) of graphene nanosheets with relatively uniform particle morphology and pore size distributions. Owing to its superior electrical conductivity, the waste burlap derived biocarbon nanostructure was effectively used as a sustainable conductive additive in the fabrication of electrodes for electrical double layer capacitors (EDLCs), which exhibited excellent performance compared to the commercial carbon black (SP) and commercial-grade graphene (CG). This work can open up exciting prospects to address the demand for sustainable alternatives to the conventional fossil-based materials in a wide range of cutting-edge applications.