A Composite Mesh of N-doped Carbon/Polyaniline Nanowire Arrays for a Flexible Self-Supporting Interdigital Solid Supercapacitor

The carbon-based flexible solid supercapacitor has great potential applications in wearable electronics due to its excellent flexibility, knitability and tailorable performance. However, the low energy density of the flexible carbon-based flexible solid supercapacitor has become a major bottleneck for their wide application in the future. In this article, composite meshes of N-doped carbon/polyaniline (PANI) nanowire arrays (NCPA) have been fabricated successfully by using dilute polymerization. The PANI nanowire array coating decorated on the N-doped carbon mesh is crucial for the improvement of electrochemical performance. This unique micromorphology not only increases the specific surface area, but also facilitates electrolyte ion diffusion, effectively buffering the volume expansion of the PANI nanowire array and increasing the utilization of the PANI nanowire array. The sheet resistance of the NCPA mesh electrode materials is about 20 Ω/sq. The maximum area specific capacitance for the NCPA-0.5 mesh based flexible self-supporting interdigital solid supercapacitor is about 7.7 mF cm⁻² at a current density of 5 μA cm⁻². The NCPA-0.5 mesh based flexible self-supporting interdigital solid supercapacitor also displays excellent folding endurance. The capacitance retention rate is still as high as 94% after folding 10,000 times.

The N-doped carbon/PANI nanowire array composite mesh based flexible self-supporting interdigital solid supercapacitor exhibit good electrochemical and flexibility performance.