Conductive and flexible PEDOT-decorated paper as high performance electrode fabricated by vapor phase polymerization for supercapacitor

Currently, electrodes with favorable flexibility, high capacitance and conductivity is vital to the development of supercapacitors. However, it is still a great challenge to manufacture these materials simply and inexpensively. Herein, vapor phase polymerization (VPP) is applied in this work to deposit poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) (PEDOT) on the flexible paper, which can prepare electrode on a large scale. The fabricated PEDOT/paper possesses porous structure, which can facilitate sufficient contact between electrolyte and electrode material, and benefit for ions diffusion. The effect of different amount of PEDOT on the electrochemical properties of the PEDOT/paper is investigated. As expected, the prepared electrode exhibits high areal capacitance of 639 m F cm(-2) and good conductivity of 78 S cm(-1), remarkable stability under different bending angle conditions, which can be directly used as electrode for flexible and light-weight energy storage devices. It is believed that the method is useful to improve both electrical conductivity and capacitance of the PEDOT/paper, and further to optimize the electrochemical performance of the prepared material.