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

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.

Citation
Xia, C., Chen, W., Wang, X., Hedhili, M. N., Wei, N., & Alshareef, H. N. (2015). Highly Stable Supercapacitors with Conducting Polymer Core-Shell Electrodes for Energy Storage Applications. Advanced Energy Materials, 5(8), 1401805. doi:10.1002/aenm.201401805

Acknowledgements
C.X. and W.C. contributed equally to this work. Research reported in this publication has been supported by King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST). Chuan Xia acknowledges supports from the KAUST Graduate Fellowship. C.X. also thanks Dr. Peng Li, Dr. Rakhi, and Dr. Nagaraju at KAUST for several useful discussions. The authors thank the staff of the Nanofabrication Core Laboratory for their excellent support.

Publisher
Wiley

Journal
Advanced Energy Materials

DOI
10.1002/aenm.20140180510.1002/aenm.201570041

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