Improving the performance of all-solid-state supercapacitors by modifying ionic liquid gel electrolytes with graphene nanosheets prepared by arc-discharge

Ionic liquid gel polymers have widely been used as the electrolytes in all-solid-state supercapacitors, but they suffer from low ionic conductivity and poor electrochemical performance. Arc discharge is a fast, low-cost and scalable method to prepare multi-layered graphene nanosheets, and as-made graphene nanosheets (denoted as ad-GNSs) with few defects, high electrical conductivity and high thermal stability should be favorable conductive additive materials. Here, a novel ionic liquid gel polymer electrolyte based on an ionic liquid (EMIMNTF2) and an copolymer (P(VDF-HFP)) was modified by the addition of ad-GNSs as an ionic conducting promoter. This modified gel electrolyte shows excellent thermal stability up to 400 °C and a wide electrochemical window of 3 V. An all-solid-state supercapacitor based on commercial activated carbon was fabricated using this modified ionic liquid gel polymer electrolyte, which shows obviously improved electrochemical behaviors compared with those of the corresponding all-solid-state supercapacitor using pure ionic liquid gel polymer electrolyte. Specially, smaller internal resistance, higher specific capacitance, better rate performance and cycling stability are achieved. These results indicate that the ionic liquid gel polymers modified by ad-GNSs would be promising and suitable gel electrolytes for high performance all-solid-state electrochemical devices.

Several layer graphene nanosheets (ad-GNSs) were synthesized by the arc discharge method. Ionic liquid (IL) gel polymer electrolytes were modified by the addition of ad-GNSs as ionic conducting promoters, resulting in higher conductivity and better electrochemical performance than pure IL gel polymer electrolytes.Figure optionsDownload as PowerPoint slide