Morphology-Dependent Enhancement of the Pseudocapacitance of Template-Guided Tunable Polyaniline Nanostructures

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...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of physical chemistry. C 2013-07, Vol.117 (29), p.15009-15019
Main Authors: Chen, Wei, Rakhi, R. B, Alshareef, H. N
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Cross-disciplinary physics: materials science
rheology
Exact sciences and technology
Materials science
Methods of crystal growth
physics of crystal growth
Nanoscale materials and structures: fabrication and characterization
Nanotubes
Other topics in nanoscale materials and structures
Physics
Porous materials
granular materials
Specific materials
Theory and models of crystal growth
physics of crystal growth, crystal morphology and orientation
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Summary: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.
ISSN:1932-7447
1932-7455
DOI:10.1021/jp405300p