Novel nitrogen doped graphene sponge with ultrahigh capacitive deionization performance

As water shortage has become a serious global problem, capacitive deionization (CDI) with high energy efficiency and low cost, is considered as a promising desalination technique to solve this problem. To date, CDI electrodes are mainly made up of porous carbon materials. However, the electrosorption performance obtained by now still cannot meet the demand of practical application. Therefore, a rationally designed structure of electrode materials has been an urgent need for CDI application. Here, a novel nitrogen-doped graphene sponge (NGS), with high specific surface area and rationally designed structure was fabricated, and used as CDI electrodes for the first time. The results show that NGS exhibits an ultrahigh electrosorption capacity of 21.0 mg g(−1) in ∼500 mg L(−1) NaCl solution, and to our knowledge, it is the highest value reported for carbon electrodes in similar experimental conditions by now. NGS in this work is expected to be a promising candidate as CDI electrode material.