However, traditionally commercial activated carbon electrodes show undesirable storage capacity due to their unitary pore structure and insufficient active sites. The limited capacitive contribution of the activated carbon cathode is hard to match with the high capacity and kinetics of the Zn anode. Thus, the bottleneck is to design and construct advanced PC cathodes for high-performance ZHSCs

Pore engineering, nanostructured design, and heteroatoms doping are efficient strategies to improve the electrochemical activities of PCs. However, the fabrication processes are generally based on indirect carbonization of precursors with demand of activations and templates.

The extensive usage of activation agents and templates leads to complicated preparation procedures, time-consuming and hazard washing process, which fail to balance the environmental issues and their targeted electrochemical properties. Moreover, most heteroatoms-doped PCs are obtained uncontrollable regulation procedures and arbitrary distribution of heteroatoms, leading to difficulties in understanding the relationship of specific heteroatom configuration and Zn ion storage capability.

Thus, it is urgent to purpose a sustainable and controllable strategy to engineer carbons with targeted structural and compositional properties toward ZHSCs.