| Pacific Rim Symposium on Surfaces, Coatings and Interfaces (PacSurf 2014) | |
| Energy Harvesting & Storage | Tuesday Sessions |
| Session EH-TuE |
| Session: | Batteries, Capacitors & Storage Materials |
| Presenter: | Xiaoxia Liu, Northeastern University, China |
| Authors: | M. Bai, Northeastern University, China X. Liu, Northeastern University, China |
| Correspondent: | Click to Email |
Electrochemical Deposition of Organic-inorganic Composites for Supercapacitors
Ming-Hua Bai, Xiaoxia Liu*
Department of Chemistry, Northeastern University , Shenyang, 110819, China
Electrochemical capacitors (supercapacitors) are widely recognized as an important class of energy storage devices.Development of high performance supercapacitors is highly desirable to meet the increasing demand for energy storage devices. Conducting polymers, including polyaniline (PANI) and polypyrrole (PPy) have promising applications in a variety of technologic fields, including supercapacitor. One-dimensional (1D) growth control of conducting polymer, directing to polymer nanofibers, has aroused great interest because an ordered arrangement of the polymer chains favours higher conductivity and better performance in charge storage. The growth of nanofibers is known to be intrinsic to PANI, however heterogeneous nucleation on the initially-formed PANI nanofibers would result in irregularly-shaped PANI particles. The suppression of this overgrowth on the surface active sites of initially-formed PANI nanofibers has been achieved by some chemical polymerization methods, including aqueous/organic interfacial polymerization, rapidly-mixed reactions, which led to the formation of nanofibrous PANI. However, only nonfibrous, granular powder PPy can be yielded by these methods since fibrillar structure is not intrinsic for PPy and so it is very hard for PPy to grow one dimensionally. Electrochemical deposition is very attractive due to the ability to anchor the product onto substrate materials in the desired quantity, shape and size in one single step, enabling the final application to be performed easier.
In this work, we will present the one-dimensional growth of conducting polymer through electrochemical co-deposition with inorganic oxide. Pseudocapacitive properties of the obtained composite films are studied as well. The local environment at the electrode surface for polymerization was tried to be controlled by the electrodeposition of inorganic oxide from their precursors like VO2+, in which process proton may be released and some of the anodic charges may be consumed. Composites with improved electrochemical performance were obtained through 1D growth control of the conducting polymer, leading to increased surface area and organic-inorganic synergistic effect.
Acknowledgements
We gratefully acknowledge financial supports from National Natural Science Foundation of China (project number: 21273029) and Research Foundation for Doctoral Program of Higher Education of China (project number: 20120042110024).