Functions of Hydroxyapatite in Fabricating N-doped Carbon for Excellent Catalyst and Supercapacitor

Functions of hydroxyapatite (HAP) in fabricating nitrogen-containing carbon materials with 1, 10-phenanthroline as precursor were demonstrated. HAP can efficiently prevent 1, 10-phenanthroline from subliming and promote it to graphitized carbon during the annealing process. More importantly, HAP was favor of generating active oxygen-containing groups on the final nitrogen-doped carbon NC(HAP), which exhibited excellent catalytic performance for the oxidative coupling of amines to imines and remarkable electrochemical performance for supercapacitors. In electrochemical experiments, NC(HAP) possessed outstanding specific capacitance of 366 F•g−1 at 0.5 A•g−1 and excellent capacitance retention of 98.5 % after 5000 charge–discharge cycles at 10 A•g−1.