LAUSR

Abstract The development of environment-friendly separators with low cost and high efficiency is necessary for the application of supercapacitors. Herein, as an inexpensive, clean and renewable biomass, tree leave was developed to be used as a new kind of separator for supercapacitor. After being chemically activated with sodium hydroxide for proper time, four kinds of activated tree leaves exhibited abundant nanosized and interconnected pores on surface, which was beneficial for the ion transport and resulted in better performance of supercapacitor. Particularly, the supercapacitor using activated cinnamomum camphora leaf as the separator displayed the highest specific capacitance (251 F g−1) at the current density of 0.5 A g−1. Meanwhile, the specific capacitance retained about 80% even after 1000 consecutive cycles, showing good stability. All the results indicated the activated tree leaves-based separators with facile fabrication, low cost and high performance had promising application in supercapacitors.