Design and synthesis of three-dimensional hierarchical ordered porous carbons for supercapacitors

• The 3D HOPCs are prepared by a facile templating method.
• The pore structure of the 3D HOPCs can be effectively controllable.
• The 3D HOPCs show exellent supercapacitive performances.
• The high specific capacitance of 247 F g−1 is achieved.

Three-dimensional hierarchical ordered porous carbons (3D HOPCs) have been successfully prepared through templating method using silica sphere nano-array as a hard template, triblock copolymer P123 as a soft template and sucrose as a carbon source, and used as the electrode materials for supercapacitors. The structure, morphology and physicochemical properties of the as-prepared 3D HOPCs are characterized by nitrogen adsorption–desorption isotherm, scanning electron microscopy (SEM), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and cyclic voltammetry (CV), galvanostatic charge–discharge (GCD) tests, and cycle life measurements. The results show that the 3D HOPCs possess well-interconnected 3D hierarchical ordered porous structure. Especially, the 3D HOPC-80, of which the pore size is 4.01 nm, shows the specific surface area of 1182 m2 g−1 and a specific capacitance of 247 F g−1 at the current density of 1 A g−1. Besides, the supercapacitors based on 3D HOPCs exhibit excellent rate performance, high energy densities of 7.5 W h kg−1 and 5.8 W h kg−1 at the power densities of 500 W kg−1 and 10000 W kg−1, respectively. Moreover, the supercapacitors using 3D HOPCs as electrode materials hold high capacitance retentions over 91% even after 10000 cycles.