Highly stable supercapacitors with conducting polymer core-shell electrodes for energy storage applications

Chuan Xia, Wei Chen, Xianbin Wang, Mohamed N. Hedhili, Nini Wei, Husam N. Alshareef

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

160 Scopus citations

Abstract

Conducting polymers such as polyaniline (PAni) show a great potential as pseudocapacitor materials for electrochemical energy storage applications. Yet, the cycling instability of PAni resulting from structural alteration is a major hurdle to its commercial application. Here, the development of nanostructured PAni-RuO2 core-shell arrays as electrodes for highly stable pseudocapacitors with excellent energy storage performance is reported. A thin layer of RuO2 grown by atomic layer deposition (ALD) on PAni nanofibers plays a crucial role in stabilizing the PAni pseudocapacitors and improving their energy density. The pseudocapacitors, which are based on optimized PAni-RuO2 core-shell nanostructured electrodes, exhibit very high specific capacitance (710 F g-1 at 5 mV s-1) and power density (42.2 kW kg-1) at an energy density of 10 Wh kg-1. Furthermore, they exhibit remarkable capacitance retention of ≈88% after 10 000 cycles at very high current density of 20 A g-1, superior to that of pristine PAni-based pseudocapacitors. This prominently enhanced electrochemical stability successfully demonstrates the buffering effect of ALD coating on PAni, which provides a new approach for the preparation of metal-oxide/conducting polymer hybrid electrodes with excellent electrochemical performance.
Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)1401805
JournalAdvanced Energy Materials
Volume5
Issue number8
DOIs
StatePublished - Jan 14 2015

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Renewable Energy, Sustainability and the Environment
  • General Materials Science

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