Biodegradable polymer-modified graphene/polyaniline electrodes for supercapacitors

•Chitosan modified graphene and polyaniline hybrid supercapacitor is proposed.•Chitosan prevents graphene restacking and helps forming more nucleation sites for aniline.•Electrochemical performances are improved for chitosan modified electrode.•PANI anchoring can offer rich redox faradaic reactions.•Specific capacitance is 340 F/g at 1 A/g, and high cyclic stability of 74% after 1000 cycles is achieved.

A promising supercapacitor material based on chitosan-modified graphene/polyaniline (CS-G/PANI) composite has been successfully synthesized by in situ polymerization. In this work, we established an environmentally friendly approach to the synthesis of well-dispersed graphene based on the biodegradable polymer chitosan (CS) using graphene oxide (GO) as a precursor. The merit of this approach is that CS acts as a stabilizing agent for GO after reduction. The resulting material was shown to exhibit good dispersion in water, and hence, this CS-G facilitates the adsorption of aniline monomers by increasing the exposure of aniline nuclei growth sites. Under the same polyaniline (PANI) concentration, chitosan modified graphene/PANI (CS-G/PANI) nanocomposites showed higher PANI adsorption than graphene/PANI (G/PANI). The CS-G/PANI nanocomposite achieved a greater which is the highest value reported to date for starch-modified graphene subjected to in situ polymerization. The modified CS-G/PANI electrode shows a potential alternative path to achieve high capacitance by preventing graphene aggregation in a simple and cost effective method, which consequently leads to a new avenue for fabricating excellent electrochemical devices.