Morphology-dependent enhancement of the pseudocapacitance of template-guided tunable polyaniline nanostructures

Wei Chen, Rakhi Raghavan Baby, Husam N. Alshareef

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

110 Scopus citations

Abstract

Polyaniline is one of the most investigated conducting polymers as supercapacitor material for energy storage applications. The preparation of nanostructured polyaniline with well-controlled morphology is crucial to obtaining good supercapacitor performance. We present here a facile chemical process to produce polyaniline nanostructures with three different morphologies (i.e., nanofibers, nanospheres, and nanotubes) by utilizing the corresponding tunable morphology of MnO2 reactive templates. A growth mechanism is proposed to explain the evolution of polyaniline morphology based on the reactive templates. The morphology-induced improvement in the electrochemical performance of polyaniline pseudocapacitors is as large as 51% due to the much enhanced surface area and the porous nature of the template-guided polyaniline nanostructures. In addition, and for the first time, a redox-active electrolyte is applied to the polyaniline pseudocapacitors to achieve significant enhancement of pseudocapacitance. Compared to the conventional electrolyte, the enhancement of pseudocapacitance in the redox-active electrolyte is 49%-78%, depending on the specific polyaniline morphology, reaching the highest reported capacitance of 896 F/g for polyaniline full cells so far. © 2013 American Chemical Society.
Original languageEnglish (US)
Pages (from-to)15009-15019
Number of pages11
JournalThe Journal of Physical Chemistry C
Volume117
Issue number29
DOIs
StatePublished - Jul 12 2013

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Surfaces, Coatings and Films
  • General Energy
  • Physical and Theoretical Chemistry
  • Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

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