J. Mater. Sci. Technol. ›› 2019, Vol. 35 ›› Issue (8): 1691-1699.DOI: 10.1016/j.jmst.2019.04.003

• Orginal Article • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Preparation of NiCoFe-hydroxide/polyaniline composite for enhanced-performance supercapacitors

Lu Liu1, Xi Hu1, Hong-Yan Zeng*(), Mo-Yu Yi, Shi-Gen Shen, Sheng Xu, Xi Cao, Jin-Ze Du   

  1. College of Chemical Engineering, Xiangtan University, Xiangtan 411105, China
  • Received:2018-12-14 Revised:2019-02-13 Accepted:2019-03-15 Online:2019-08-05 Published:2019-06-19
  • Contact: Zeng Hong-Yan
  • About author:

    1The authors contributed equally to this work.

Abstract:

Ternary NiCoFe layer hydroxides with different Ni/Co/Fe molar ratios were prepared using simple urea method. By finely tuning Ni/Co/Fe molar ratio, the optimized hydroxide (LDH2.0), a Ni/Co/Fe molar ratio of 2.0/1.0/1.0, provided high specific capacitance (408 F g-1 at 2.0 A g-1) and good stability (90.9% retention over 1000 cycles) due to maximum crystallinity (91.35% crystallinity) and specific surface area (160 m2 g-1). In order to further improve the electrochemical performances, the LDH2.0 was made into a composite (LDH/PANI) with polyaniline (PANI) via in situ polymerization of aniline monomer. The LDH/PANI composite had a much higher specific capacitance (717 F g-1 at 2.0 A g-1) compared with the LDH2.0, and a significant improvement of cycleability (84.7% retention over 1000 cycles). The results indicated that the LDH/PANI had a synergistic effect of both components due to the complementary properties, which guaranteed a good electric contact and consequently increased the specific capacitance. These provided a new approach for designing organic-inorganic composite materials with potential application in supercapacitors.

Key words: NiCoFe hydroxide, Polyaniline, Composite, Supercapacitors