Dual-Porous Holey Graphene for Supercapacitor Applications

Incorporation of pores into semimetal graphene layers has been proven to be an efficient strategy to produce a band gap. The presence of pores within graphene layers results in enhanced physical and electronic properties (such as an increased surface area, a greater number of active sites, and a faster electron transfer rate) compared to nondefective graphene. As a result, porous graphene has been acknowledged as a porous carbon material, especially for electrochemical use. A bottom-up approach offers atomic precision and structural control over the top-down approaches. Very recently, our group established a method for creating crystalline porous graphene (PG) from the amorphous conjugated microporous polymer (CMP) via solution-phase synthesis. In this study, we demonstrate solution-phase synthesis of a porous graphene AN-PERY-PG containing an array of two different types of homogeneous pores through heterogeneous dehydrogenative Scholl cyclization. The ordered pores within PG were characterized using Raman spectroscopy, different morphological analyses, and theoretical studies. Insertion of two different types of pores resulted in enhanced surface area (668 m2 g–1) and supercapacitive behavior (680 F g–1 with 89% capacitance retention over 5000 cycles) compared to our previously reported porous graphene.