•New high-performance spherical carbon was prepared from sucrose.•A facile process for fabrication of a high efficiency electrode material.•The specific capacitance of the NF@SC was up to 296 F g−1 at 1 A g−1.•Capacitance retention after 10000 GCD cycles was above 98%.Three-dimensional spherical carbon/nickel foam composites for use as non-adhesive supercapacitor electrodes were prepared using high temperature and high pressure hydrothermal methods and their energy storage capacity was assessed. The obtained electrodes exhibited an excellent capacitive behavior in KOH solutions, characterized by low contact resistance, good rate performance (82.7% retention at 10 A g−1), and high specific capacitance (296 F g−1) much higher than that of other powder carbon electrode materials (162 F g−1). Furthermore, the electrode exhibited a large energy density (41.1 Wh kg−1 at a power density of 500 W kg−1) and superior cycle stability (only 2% loss after 10,000 cycles). The developed synthesis strategy is facile and with potential application in large-scale production.

Prickly carbonated hydroxyapatite(CHAp) spheres were obtained via a facile template-free self-assembly method with Na2HPO4 and self-made cubic CaCO3 as reactants. X-ray diffraction results of the product revealed CHAp with high crystallinity could be successfully prepared in a short reaction time. A nucleation mechanism was proposed according to the results of characterizing the resultant powders and analyzing the growth process. It shows that the self-made CaCO3 particles play an important role in the template-free synthesis of prickly spheres.

Lignin is one of the important branched amorphous polymers, which generally has the irregular and fractal morphology. The preparation of regular sphere of lignin needs long steps and special conditions. In this study, the regular sphere of lignin can be simply prepared from rice husk (RH) under certain conditions. Namely, RH is mixed with 35 % ethanol aqueous solution in the proportion of 1:10 (g:mL), non-isothermally heated to 493 K and kept for 5 h. After filtration and air-drying at room temperature, the regular lignin sphere with the diameter of 100–400 nm is obtained. The regular sphere of lignin has the potential utilization in fields such as reactive functional materials, photo sensing materials and surface active materials in cosmetics. The mechanism of formation of the regular spherical lignin is proposed and discussed in this paper.

With Ti(SO4)2, SnCl4·5H2O and urea as raw materials, SnO2-TiO2 nanocomposites were synthesized via low temperature hydrothermal method at 80–100 °C in aqueous solutions. The morphologies of the products were altered systematically by varying the Ti/Sn molar ratio of the reactants, and rutile-phase particles were obtained with an average diameter of about 52.2 nm at a molar ratio of Ti/Sn=7.5. The surface composition of the composite was revealed by X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy(XPS) and X-ray diffraction(XRD) to be solely TiO2 with a rutile structure. This new composite material exhibits a high ultraviolet absorption capacity, and its photocatalytic activity for phenol oxidation is much lower than that of the commercial titania nanoparticles(P25).

Using glucose and Ni(NO3)2 as precursors, the nickel oxide–carbon (NiO–C) composites are directly formed on the nickel foam by a one-pot hydrothermal method. The product presents a spherical morphology with the carbon component in the composite being a non-graphitic phase. The presence of NiO provides additional pseudo-capacitance for the electrode materials and the composites exhibit superior specific capacitance to the pure carbon materials formed on the nickel foam. Apart from that, compared with the nickel sheet substrate, the utilization of the nickel foam benefits for the achievement of higher performance and stability owing to its unique 3D structure. The highest specific capacitance for the NiO–C–nickel foam electrode of 265.3 F g−1 is obtained at a discharge current density of 0.25 A g−1.