Scalable one-pot bacteria-templating synthesis route toward hierarchical, porous-Co3O4 superstructures for supercapacitor electrodes.

ABSTRACT

Template-driven strategy has been widely used to synthesize inorganic nano/micro materials. Here, we used a bottom-up controlled synthesis route to develop a powerful solution-based method of fabricating three-dimensional (3D), hierarchical, porous-Co3O4 superstructures that exhibit the morphology of flower-like microspheres (hereafter, RT-Co3O4). The gram-scale RT-Co3O4 was facilely prepared using one-pot synthesis with bacterial templating at room temperature. Large-surface-area RT-Co3O4 also has a noticeable pseudocapacitive performance because of its high mass loading per area (~10 mg cm(-2)), indicating a high capacitance of 214 F g(-1) (2.04 F cm(-2)) at 2 A g(-1) (19.02 mA cm(-2)), a Coulombic efficiency averaging over 95%, and an excellent cycling stability that shows a capacitance retention of about 95% after 4,000 cycles.