Flexible polyaniline coated carbon cloth as binder - Free electrode material for symmetric supercapacitor application

Nano-structured polyaniline (PANI) containing composite electrodes based on Busofit T-040 carbon cloth (CC) with high specific surface area have been developed for symmetric supercapaitor devices by one-step chemical polymerization of aniline. The capacitive performance of the CC as well as the PANI/CC composites was characterized by the cyclic voltammetry (CV) and the galvanostatic charge-discharge in H2SO4-based aqueous electrolyte. A PANI/CC composite demonstrates significant capacitance enhancement up to 222 F g-1 and 6.7 F cm-2 (vs. 120 F g-1 and 3, 1 F cm-2 for CC). The coulomb efficiency of the composites has been measured to be about 97-99 %. The technological simplicity, easy to scale up and the electrochemical performance of the flexible binder-free PANI/CC electrodes demonstrate the significance of this work for industrial application. © 2017, Peter the Great St. Petersburg Polytechnic University. © 2017, Institute of Problems of Mechanical Engineering.