Porous carbon materials are of great interest as materials for supercapacitors. A high surface area, short channels, as well as interconnected and hierarchical pore architectures are favorable for such materials. Doping with heteroatoms such as boron, nitrogen, or phosphorus has proved to be an effective approach to further enhance the electrochemical performance of carbon materials, as the heteroatoms can lead to increased electronic conductivity, surface polarity, and reversible pseudocapacitance.

Yusuke Yamauchi, National Institute for Materials Science, Ibaraki, Japan, and colleagues have developed a simplified procedure for the preparation of nitrogen-doped carbon (NC) materials by using nontoxic nitrogenous dopamine as a precursor.

The resulting nitrogen-doped hierarchical porous carbon framework (NHPC-3D) is composed of macro-, meso- and microporous textures, which provide a high surface area for electrical charge storage, free diffusion pathways for ion and mass transport, and nitrogen functional groups for pseudocapacitance when implemented in high-rate electric double-layer capacitors.

• Three-Dimensional Nitrogen-Doped Hierarchical Porous Carbon as an Electrode for High-Performance Supercapacitors,
  Jing Tang, Tao Wang, Rahul R. Salunkhe, Saad M. Alshehri, Victor Malgras, Yusuke Yamauchi,
  Chem. Eur. J. 2015.
  DOI: 10.1002/chem.201503590