Surfactant effect on synthesis and electrochemical properties of nickel-doped magnesium oxide (Ni–MgO) for supercapacitor applications

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Nickel-doped magnesium oxide (Ni–MgO) nanopowders were successfully synthesized by employing a simple sol–gel process by adopting different surfactants such as Hexamine, CTAB and PEG-400. XRD results clearly revealed the formation of face centered cubic structure. The characteristic PL peaks observed at 401, 490 and 552 nm are owing to charge transfer characteristic in surface state of the obtained product. The characteristic IR peaks observed at 445 and 854 cm−1 could be attributed to Mg–O stretching vibration and the peak appeared at 1036 cm−1 belongs to Mg–O vibrations modes. Scanning electron microscopy (SEM) results clearly revealed the uniform distribution of thin nanolayer morphology in different direction for Ni–MgO (CTAB) product, the mixture of nanolayer and nanoparticle configurations for Ni–MgO (Hexamine) product and more agglomerated particle formation for Ni–MgO (PEG-400) product. The electrochemical studies were carried out to estimate the specific capacitance of Ni–MgO (CTAB) product at low scan rate 10 mV/s which showed an excellent value of 360.5 F/g. The GCD studies for synthesized Ni–MgO (CTAB) nanolayer morphology have superior specific capacitance of 96 F/g at 1 A/g with the excellent specific capacitance. The materials stability for 5000 charging and discharging cycles retains 68% of the specific capacitance 83 F/g at current density of 5 A/g.