Design and fabrication of flexible supercapacitor devices by using mesoporous carbon/polyaniline ink

Abstract

In this work, mesoporous carbon materials were synthesized by soft template method. In this strategy, poly (ethylene oxide)-poly (propylene oxide)-poly (ethylene oxide) block co-polymers (F127) were used as the template while fructose were employed as the carbon precursor. After hydrothermal treatment, the soft templates could be easily removed by pyrolysis of the as-prepared carbon materials in argon. The resultant mesoporous carbon (MC) materials exhibit a specific surface area of ~422m2g−1. In addition, the as-prepared MC was incorporated together with polyaniline (PANI) to form the carbon-based ink. By using the screen printing method, the as-prepared ink was printed on the flexible substrate of polyethylene glycol terephthalate (PET) with silver layer. The as-fabricated flexible supercapacitor electrode was evaluated by galvanostatic charge-discharge and cyclic voltammetry (CV). By creating more storage space of electrons generated by the redox reaction of PANI, it is noticed that the specific capacitance of the supercapacitor of MC/PANI is about 2.5 times of the supercapacitor of PANI. The method of carbon-based ink synthesis and flexible supercapacitor fabrication could give a potential guidance for the flexible energy storage device fabrication.