Polyaniline nanotube synthesized from natural tubular halloysite template as high performance pseudocapacitive electrode

Abstract

Design and preparation of nanostructured conducting polymers (CPs) is a very important research direction for high performance CPs-based supercapacitors (SCs). With hollow structure, high surface area, tunable surface properties and abundant resources, natural halloysite is a promising template agent for preparing new nanotubular-structure CPs. Here, nanotubular-structure polyaniline was successfully synthesized using natural tubular halloysite as hard template. The obtained tubular polyaniline presents high specific capacitance at various current density as electrode material for supercapacitors. After a facile carbon coating, the carbon coated tubular polyaniline shows high specific capacitance of 654 F g−1 at the current density of 1 A g−1 and excellent electrochemical stability with capacitance retentions ∼87% after 10000 cycles. This work may prove the feasibility of preparing high performance CPs-based nanostructure electrode materials for SCs application based on inexpensive natural clay minerals.