One–pot fabrication and capacitive performances of coral-like polyaniline formed in saturated salt solution

Abstract

An efficient and simple template-free approach was present to construct hierarchical coral-like polyaniline (PANI) in a saturated salt solution for scalable fabricating active material with excellent performance for supercapacitor application. The structure, morphology, and capacitance properties of coral-like PANI were investigated. The coral-like PANI with a highly crystalline structure was found to be composed of nanofibers with a diameter and length of 50–80 nm and 200–500 nm, respectively. Furthermore, the prepared PANI electrode exhibited excellent capacitive performances (465.1 F g−1 at 2 A g−1) and remained 81.0 % even at 100 A g−1, and 62.2 % retained after 2000 cycles. It showed that the coral-like PANI has great potential for development in the supercapacitor field as electrode material.