Enhancing the cycling stability of the polyaniline hybrids benefited from the hollow manganese dioxide/acetylene black skeleton

• The novel 1D PANI–AB nanocomposites can be fabricated by MnO2 nanotubes.
• The obtained hollow PANI–AB nanocomposites possess 1D branched structure.
• Hollowed PANI–AB hybrid nanostructures exhibit good long-term cycling stability.

Polyaniline (PANI) can be regarded as the most promising pseudocapacitive material for using as supercapacitor electrodes. However, its poor cycling stability has become the major obstacle limiting its practical applications. In this study, we have successfully improved the cycling stability of PANI-based supercapacitor by designing the PANI–acetylene black (PANI–AB) hybrid nanostructures assisted by MnO2 nanotubes as sacrificial templates with a simple and low-cost method. The hybrid nanocomposites can exhibit good long-term cycling stability and 86% of the capacitance can be retained after 1000 cycles by CV test at a scan rate of 50 mV s−1 compared to that of pure PANI-based supercapacitors. Furthermore, the PANI–5%AB hollowed hybrids also exhibit much better electrochemical performance (520 F g−1 at 1 A g−1) than that of pure PANI pseudocapacitors (271 F g−1 at 1 A g−1). The as-prepared full cells based on the hybrid structures can be further demonstrated that the PANI–5%AB based electrodes can have promising performance with high power density of 1361 W kg−1 and energy density of 17.8 W h kg−1 at current density of 2 A g−1, even 6.32 kW kg−1 and 14.1 W h kg−1 at high current density of 10 A g−1. The supercapacitor performances demonstrate that PANI–5%AB hybrid nanocomposites are very promising for high-performance electrochemical supercapacitor application.

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