Intense pulsed light-assisted facile and agile fabrication of cobalt oxide/nickel cobaltite nanoflakes on nickel-foam for high performance supercapacitor applications

• The CoO/NiCo2O4 nanoflakes are formed on Ni-foam substrate by IPL irradiation.
• The nanoflakes are formed by IPL irradiation with an energy of 20 J cm−2 for 15 ms.
• The CoO/NiCo2O4 nanoflakes exhibit a very high specific capacitance of 2163 Fg−1.
• They show a good rate performance of 908 Fg−1 even at 50 Ag−1.

We report an extremely efficient method for fabricating high-performance supercapacitive CoO/NiCo2O4 nanoflakes on Ni-foam substrate by using intense pulsed light (IPL) technology. Structural and morphological characterization is carried out using X-ray diffraction (XRD) and scanning and transmission electron microscopies (SEM and TEM). These reveal that hierarchically structured CoO/NiCo2O4 nanoflakes of 150–200 nm in size and a thickness around 10 nm are formed on Ni-foam substrate by IPL irradiation with energy of 20 J cm−2 for 15 ms. The electrochemical behavior of the composites is analyzed by cyclic voltammetry and galvanostatic charge–discharge experiments. The IPL-induced CoO/NiCo2O4/Ni-foam electrode exhibits a very high specific capacitance of 2163 Fg−1 at a discharge current density of 1 Ag−1 and a good rate performance of 908 Fg−1 even at 50 Ag−1.