Nitrogen-Doped Carbon Coated Stainless Steel Meshes for Flexible Supercapacitors

The design versatility and performance advantages render supercapacitors (SCs) the highly appealing candidates for the energy storage units in flexible devices. For this purpose, a flexible electrode with high capacitance and excellent mechanical stability is essential. Herein, the facile fabrication strategy towards flexible SC electrodes with polyaniline (PANI) nanowires loading on nitrogen-doped carbon coated SS mesh (PANI/N-C/SS) is developed via a simple hydrothermal carbonization process and the following deposition of PANI. Derived from glucose and dicyandiamide, the nitrogen-doped carbon layer can effectively improve the contract of the SS substrate and PANI. The resultant PANI/N-C/SS electrode delivers a high areal capacitance of 624 mF cm−2 at 0.05 mA cm−2. With a large size of 40 cm2, the solid-state symmetric capacitor based on PANI/N-C/SS still possesses a capacitance of 122.6 mF cm−2, corresponding to a high energy density of 0.22 mWh cm−2.