Fabrication of cellulose acetate-chitosan based flexible 3D scaffold-like porous membrane for supercapacitor applications with PVA gel electrolyte

Abstract

The focus of this study was on the preparation of porous bio-based matrix with a view to fabricating the environment-friendly supercapacitors from two sustainable materials, cellulose acetate (CA) and chitosan (CS). The strategy used is, first preparing a tri-hybrid of rGO/NiO/Fe3O4 (rNF) particles followed by mixing it into CA/CS (CC), as prepared CC/rNF was then dipped into aniline. After the impregnation by aniline, the polymerization proceeded to get a CA/CS/PANI/rNF (CCPRNF) electrode. The prepared electrode shows excellent properties such as high conductivity (7.1 × 10–2 S/cm), an areal capacitance of 16.61 mF/cm2 at a scan rate of 5 mV/s and 88% capacitance retention after 1000 cycles. The symmetric device fabricated from 15% CCPRNF achieved areal capacitance of 5.5 mF/cm2 (scan rate 20 mV/s). Herein, we suggest a new approach for the construction of environment-friendly, flexible, conducting, 3D scaffold-like porous electrodes for supercapacitors using CA/CS through simple “phase inversion and in-situ polymerization method”. These slides can be retrieved under Electronic Supplementary Material.