Hierarchically porous carbon derived from waste acrylic fibers for super-high capacity lithium ion battery anodes

Acrylic fiber is one of three important synthetic fibers in the world. The disposal and reuse of large number of waste acrylic fibers from fabric manufacturers or waste recovery is an urgent economic and environmental issue. Here, a porous carbon was derived from waste acrylic fibers via pre-oxidized, carbonization and KOH activation. Furthermore, we adopted melamine as nitrogen source to dope the porous carbon materials. When used as the anode of lithium ion batteries, this nitrogen-doped porous carbon shows high reversible capacity of ca. 1200 mA h g−1 after 50 cycles at 0.1 A g−1. Reversible capacities of 550 and 370 mA h g−1 are obtained at higher current densities of 1 and 5 A g−1 after 500 cycles, respectively. The outstanding electrochemical performance are a result of its large mesopore volume, high-level N-doping (especially, pyridinic-N), large quantity of edge defects, and three-dimensional hierarchical porous architecture. This paper demonstrates that the reuse of waste industrial acrylic fibers as energy storage materials is a promising method for both energy and environmental fields.