Abstract Porous carbon materials have been considered as one of the most suitable candidate cathodes for the aqueous supercapacitors due to their wide sources, low cost, high structure stability, and surface area. The doping strategy is always used to enhance their electrochemical energy storage performances. Previous works focus on the effective treatment of different carbon precursors to promote their electrochemical properties but little works pay attention to the modification of commercial activated carbon (AC). Herein, a simple and facile way to prepare nitrogen, oxygen co‐doping activated carbon (N, O‐AC‐2) with porous structure has been proposed and developed via one‐step pyrolysis. With the more doping content, especially oxygen content with abundant C═O functional groups, the N, O‐AC‐2 for the supercapacitors exhibits high specific capacitance and excellent rate performance. Furthermore, N, O‐AC‐2 electrode for the zinc ion hybrid capacitor also shows good electrochemical performance in terms of high capacitance, rate capability, and cycle stability with a high capacity retention. Thus, this one‐step co‐doping strategy of modifying the AC is promising to provide information for the doping modification and synthesis of porous carbon and facilitate the development of good‐performance porous carbon electrode materials.
Zhang et al. (2025) studied this question.