Chemical vapor deposition-based synthesis of cost-effective binder-free nanostructured Ag/MoS2/Ni-F electrode material for portable energy storage devices

The synthesis of novel electrode materials (E-Ms) is the demand of scientific community to overcome the energy crisis in developing countries. Hereon, the molybdenum disulfide (MoS2) and silver-wrapped MoS2 (Ag/MoS2) E-Ms are synthesized on hierarchical-nickel foam (Ni-F) via a cost-effective chemical vapor deposition technique. The synthesized E-Ms are characterized in terms of structure, chemical bonding, surface morphology, weight percentage of elements, porosity and energy storage capability. The X-ray diffraction analysis is indicated that by wrapping of Ag species, the diffraction peaks associated with MoS2 material not only moved to higher Bragg's angles but their peaks intensities are also lowered which showed the existence of structural defects in the synthesized E-Ms. The surface area of cauliflower like Ag/MoS2/Ni-F E-Ms (170 m(2)g(-1)) is higher than the surface area (60 m(2)g(-1)) of MoS2/Ni-F E-Ms. The cauliflowers based Ag/MoS2/Ni-F E-Ms is presented supreme specific capacitance of 4200 Fg(-1) as compared to MoS2/Ni-F E-Ms (2518 Fg(-1)) at 1Ag(-1). The implementation of power law and Dunn's model is demonstrated that the synthesized E-Ms can behave like a battery and supercapacitor (0.67 < b < 0.92) nature. The diffusive-controlled contribution for cauliflower-based synthesized E-Ms is 97 % at 5 mVs(-1) and became 88 % at 70 mVs(-1). The assembled asymmetric supercapacitor (ASC) device is exhibited the specific capacitance of 957 Fg(-1), energy density of 366-284 Whkg(-1) and power density of 1494-14110 Wkg(-1). The ASC device could sustain the capacitance retention of 94 %, Coulombic efficiency of 99 % even for 20000 cycles in contrast to capacitance retention of 95 % and Coulombic efficiency of 97.89 % of the synthesized E-Ms.