1 research outputs found
Polyaniline and Polypyrrole Pseudocapacitor Electrodes with Excellent Cycling Stability
Conducting polymers such as polyaniline
and polypyrrole have been
widely used as pseudocapacitive electrode materials for supercapacitors.
However, their structural instability resulting from repeated volumetric
swelling and shrinking during charge/discharge process has been a
major hurdle for their practical applications. This work demonstrates
a simple and general strategy to substantially enhance the cycling
stability of conductive polymer electrodes by deposition of a thin
carbonaceous shell onto their surface. Significantly, carbonaceous
shell-coated polyaniline and polypyrrole electrodes achieved remarkable
capacitance retentions of ∼95 and ∼85% after 10 000
cycles. Electron microscopy studies revealed that the presence of
∼5 nm thick carbonaceous shell can effective prevent the structural
breakdown of polymer electrodes during charge/discharge process. Importantly,
the polymer electrodes with a ∼5 nm thick carbonaceous shell
exhibited comparable specific capacitance and pseudocapacitive behavior
as the bare polymer electrodes. We anticipate that the same strategy
can be applied for stabilizing other polymer electrode materials.
The capability of fabricating stable polymer electrodes could open
up new opportunities for pseudocapacitive devices