Three-dimensional non-woven poly(vinyl alcohol-co-ethylene) nanofiber based polyaniline flexible electrode for high performance supercapacitor

Polyaniline (PANI) has been fabricated on three-dimensional polyethyleneterephthalate (PET) coated with poly(vinyl alcohol-co-ethylene) nanofibers (NFs) substrate through a facile in-situ chemical oxidative polymerization method. With various concentrations of NFs, a series of PANI/NFs/PET-x flexible electrodes have been successfully obtained. Among them, the PANI/NFs/PET-5.4 (NFs mass loading of 5.4 g m−2) electrode displays the highest conductivity of 0.75 S cm−1, and the largest areal capacitance of 1.47 F cm−2 (503 F g−1) at 1 mV s−1or 1.58 F cm−2 (543 F g−1) at 1.0 mA cm−2. Furthermore, symmetric supercapacitor is assembled, exhibiting high power density (20.11 W m−2), energy density (0.61 Wh m−2) and cycling stability. This can be ascribed to the NFs, which not only provides high conductivity for electron transport, but also mitigates the degradation of PANI through the synergistic effect between NFs and PANI.