Porous nitrogen-enriched hollow carbon nanofibers as freestanding electrode for enhanced lithium storage

One-dimensional porous carbons bearing high surface areas and sufficient heteroatom doped functionalities are essential for advanced electrochemical energy storage devices, especially for developing freestanding film electrodes. Here we develop a porous, nitrogen-enriched, freestanding hollow carbon nanofiber (PN-FHCF) electrode material via filtration of polypyrrole (PPy) hollow nanofibers formed by in situ self-degraded template-assisted strategy, followed by NH₃-assisted carbonization. The PN-FHCF retains the freestanding film morphology that is composed of three-dimensional networks from the entanglement of 1D nanofiber and delivers 3.7-fold increase in specific surface area (592 m²·g⁻¹) compared to the carbon without NH₃ treatment (FHCF). In spite of the enhanced specific surface area, PN-FHCF still exhibits comparable high content of surface N functionalities (8.8%, atom fraction) to FHCF. Such developed hierarchical porous structure without sacrificing N doping functionalities together enables the achievement of high capacity, high-rate property and good cycling stability when applied as self-supporting anode in lithium-ion batteries, superior to those of FHCF without NH₃ treatment.