Mechanochemistry: A Green, Activation-Free and Top-Down Strategy to High-Surface-Area Carbon Materials

Renewable resources (e.g., agricultural byproducts) are widely used in the production of commercial activated carbon, but the activation procedures still have serious drawbacks. Here we develop a green, activation-free, top-down method to prepare high-surface-area carbon materials from agricultural wastes through mechanochemistry. The facile mechanochemical process can smash the monolithic agricultural wastes into tiny microparticles with abundant surfaces and bulk defects, which leads to the generation of well-developed hierarchical porous structures after direct carbonization. The as-obtained carbon materials simultaneously present high surface areas (1771 m2 g–1) and large pore volumes (1.88 cm3 g–1), and thus demonstrate excellent electrochemical performances as the interlayer for lithium–sulfur batteries and much superior creatinine adsorption capabilities to the medicinal charcoal tablets. These results provide a new direction for fabricating high-surface-area porous materials without any toxic reagents or complicated activation procedures, and can spur promising electrochemical and medical applications.