Conductive silver nanowires-fenced carbon cloth fibers-supported layered double hydroxide nanosheets as a flexible and binder-free electrode for high-performance asymmetric supercapacitors

Abstract

Silver nanowires (Ag NWs) have attracted particular interest in the development of various electronic and energy storage devices due to their one-dimensional structure, good conductivity, fast charge transportation and direct contact to the current collector. Herein, we have successfully deposited the binder-free nickel-cobalt layered double hydroxide nanosheets on Ag NWs-fenced carbon cloth (NC LDH NSs@Ag@CC) by a facile electrochemical deposition method with a chronoamperometry voltage of −1.0V for 120s. The electrically conductive and superhydrophilic nature of the hybrid nanocomposite electrode led to relatively high areal capacitance (1133.3 mF cm−2 at 1mAcm−2) and good cycling stability (80.47% after 2000 cycles) compared to the electrode prepared without Ag NWs. Using such hierarchical NC LDH NSs@Ag@CC as a positive electrode, we further fabricated a flexible asymmetric supercapacitor (ASC) with activated carbon coated CC as a negative electrode. The as-assembled ASC exhibited maximum operational potential window of 1.6V, high areal capacitance of 230.2 mF cm−2 and excellent cycling stability of 88.1% with remarkable energy densities at all the charge-discharge conditions (78.8 μWh cm−2 at the power density of 785 μW cm−2 and 40 μWh cm−2 at the high power density of 12.1mWcm−2, respectively)