Evaporation-induced hydrated graphene/polyaniline/carbon cloth integration towards high mass loading supercapacitor electrodes

Abstract

The convenient fabrication of supercapacitor electrodes with high active material mass loading is of great significance to the practical application. In this paper, a novel and efficient strategy is proposed to prepare graphene/polyaniline (PANI) composite with controllable mass loading towards high-performance supercapacitor electrodes. The graphene oxide (GO)/PANI colloid layer is drop-coated onto carbon cloth (CC) before evaporating most of the water. The as-obtained hydrated GO/PANI/CC film undergoes a facile hydrazine reduction treatment and yields the porous reduced GO (rGO)/PANI active layer fixed on the CC current collector, which could directly act as the binder-free supercapacitor electrode. As a result, the excellent adhesion of active layer with CC and the uniform PANI distribution on porous rGO matrix contribute greatly to the fast electron and ion transport in the electrochemical activities. The integrated rGO/PANI/CC electrode achieves a high specific capacitance of 871.5 F g−1 at the current density of 1.5 A g−1 with superior rate performance. More importantly, repeating the drop-coating/water-evaporating process could conveniently realize the high rGO/PANI mass loading (up to 10 mg cm−2) on the current collector. The corresponding symmetric all-solid-state supercapacitors with different mass loadings can deliver the maximum energy densities of 39.1 Wh kg−1, 425.3 μWh cm−2, and 4.0 mWh cm−3, manifesting their promising practical prospect. This work would provide a new path for the fabrication of graphene-based supercapacitor electrodes and other functional film materials.