Application of Activated Carbon based on High-sulfur Petroleum Coke in Potassium-ion Batteries

With the increase of the output of crude oil, the output of petroleum coke has increased dramatically. The production of petroleum coke is in a large scale as well as the price is quite cheap. How to use it efficiently becomes an important issue among the global petrochemical industry. Shandong Zibo petroleum coke (ZPC), which has a relatively larger output in China is selected as the main research object. The performance of its activated carbon as anode materials for secondary batteries were studied in details. The KOH activation of petroleum coke mainly produces micropores, and with the KOH/coke mass ratio increasing, the activated carbon forming larger specific surface area and more porous structure. The potassium storage performance experiments of as-referred activated carbon with different specific surface areas showed that AC-PC-3 (996m
²
/g) showed the best long-term cycle stability. Therefore, when the specific surface area of AC-PC is around 1000 $\mathrm{m}^{2}$/g, the potassium-ion batteries (PIBs) show the best performance.