Significantly enhancing supercapacitive performance of nitrogen-doped graphene nanosheet electrodes by phosphoric acid activation.

In this work, we present a new method to synthesize the phosphorus, nitrogen contained graphene nanosheets, which uses dicyandiamide to prevent the aggregation of graphene oxide and act as the nitrogen precursor, and phosphoric acid (H3PO4) as the activation reagent. We have found that through the H3PO4 activation, the samples exhibit the remarkably enhanced supercapacitive performance, and depending on the amount of H3PO4 introduced, the specific capacitance of the samples is gradually increased from 7.6 to 244.6 F g(-1). Meanwhile, the samples also exhibit the good rate capability and excellent stability (up to 10 000 cycles). Through the transmission electron microscopy, high-resolution transmission electron microscopy, X-ray diffraction, X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy and Brunauer-Emmett-Teller analyses, H3PO4 treatment induced large pore volume and phosphorus related function groups in the product are assumed to response for the enhancement.