The porous carbons with high specific surface area and excellent electrochemical properties were prepared using three types of green needle coke as raw materials. Electrochemical performances of the porous carbons derived from different microstructure green needle coke were investigated. The XRD and Raman spectra demonstrated that the content of the ordered carbon microcrystals were decreased and the content of amorphous and cross-linked structure were increased in the porous carbons with comparison to the raw materials. The results of N2 adsorption–desorption analysis verified that the content of ordered microcrystalline structure in the raw materials evidently influence the specific surface area and pore size distribution of the porous carbons. The porous carbon with 1665 m2 g−1 specific surface area and 2.89 nm average pore size has shown that the specific capacitance was 288 F g−1 at the current density 1 A g−1. Furthermore, the capacity retention was 94.93% and the Coulombic efficiency was 92.87% after 5000 charge/discharge cycles.

    Abstract
    1 Introduction
    2 Materials and methods
        2.1 Preparation of porous carbons
        2.2 Characterization of samples
        2.3 Electrochemical measurements
    3 Results and discussion
    4 Conclusions
    Acknowledgements 
    References

• Junxia Cheng(University of Science and Technology Liaoning)
• Zhenjie Lu(University of Science and Technology Liaoning)
• Xuefei Zhao(University of Science and Technology Liaoning)
• Xingxing Chen(University of Science and Technology Liaoning)
• Yaming Zhu(University of Science and Technology Liaoning)
• Hongyu Chu(University of Science and Technology Liaoning)