Beyond conventional supercapacitors: Hierarchically conducting polymer-coated 3D nanostructures for integrated on-chip micro-supercapacitors employing ionic liquid electrolytes

Abstract

The potential of electroactive conducting polymers (ECPs), as innovative pseudocapacitive materials, has recently emerged as a promising strategy to design new and advanced concepts in the field of electrochemical energy storage devices. From this point of view, the synergistic effect produced between high electroactivity ECPs (faradaic behaviour) and large active surface 3D nanostructured materials (electrochemical double layer behaviour) in terms of their high specific capacitance, high energy and power density as well as long lifetime, has awakened an enormous interest in the domain of (micro)-supercapacitors. Accordingly, in this work, we have originally analyzed the conformal electrochemical deposition of three different π-conjugated heterocyclic polymers [poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene, polypyrrole and polyaniline] onto various vertically-oriented 3D nanoarchitectures, as for example silicon nanowires (SiNWs), diamond nanowires (DiNWs) or graphene nanosheets (GNs) among others. Next, the resulting as-grown hybrid materials were evaluated as attractive electrodes in symmetric supercapacitors (sandwich configuration) in presence of organic, aqueous, aprotic and protic ionic liquid (IL) electrolytes respectively. An exhaustive characterization of their corresponding electrochemical performances was investigated according to our previously reported works, confirming the remarkable cycling stability of ECPs in ILs. In addition, a detailed state-of-the-art dealing with other types of (micro)-supercapacitors in the literature was reported to corroborate the great impact of such devices to pave the way towards the elaboration of next generation high performance supercapacitors in the coming years.