Self-healing polyaniline-graphene oxides based electrodes with enhanced cycling stability

Highlights: • Self-healing polymer is used to enhance the electrode structure stability of PANI electrode. • Molecular tailoring and combining of graphene oxides are employed to suppress materials degradation. • A high capacitance retention of 97.5% after 9000 cycles is achieved in AT-GO self-healing devices. Polyaniline (PANI) is a strong competitor as a high performance supercapacitor electrode material. However, it suffers from the poor cycling life, which is caused by electrode structure damages and materials degradation occurred during charge-discharge process. Therefore, self-healing PANI-graphene oxides based electrodes have been develop with the aim to enhance the electrode structure stability. It could rebuild the electronic contact between pulverized PANI nanostructures and electrode matrix, which leads to the recovery of specific capacitance. In coral-like PANI and PANI-graphene oxides (PANI-GO) composited based self-healing devices, capacitance retention of about 93% after 9000 cycles has been achieved. In order to further supress the material degradation, aniline tetramer-graphene oxides composites (AT-GO) with lower rigidity have been synthesized. The AT-GO based self-healing device exhibits a very good cycling stability with capacitance retention up to 97.5% after 9000 cycles. It also shows a high cell specific capacitance of 143.2 F g⁻¹ obtained at 0.5 A g⁻¹, suggesting the good electrochemical performance. This work demonstrates the idea of using self-healing polymer to enhance the cycling stability of PANI composites based electrodes.