Thin carbon–polypyrrole composite materials for supercapacitor electrodes by novel bipolar electrochemical setup

Abstract

A simple approach to mitigate the use of high voltages on thin bipolar electrodes is described here for the first time. The method involves stacking the desired thin conductor onto a thicker one, thereby creating a pseudo-single electrode whose width is the sum of the two. Placing the target material on the positive or negative face of the combined bipolar electrode selects which reaction it will be involved in. This method is used to graft sheets of carbon paper, cloth, and buckypaper with an aminophenyl layer that subsequently binds polypyrrole in a simple two stage reaction to create a one-sided deposit of a supercapacitive material. By itself the necessary driving potential for these reactions exceed 90 V, while with the stack it drops to 9 V. The resulting supercapacitor electrodes display good performance, with specific capacitances up to 210 mF/cm 2 and lasting 2500 charge/discharge cycles.

Polyaniline-graphene based composites electrode materials in supercapacitor: synthesis, performance and prospects

“…In recent reports, many similar hybrid composites have been widely reported as electrodes for SCs. Patterson and Ignaszak [29] first described a simple method to mitigate the use of high voltages on thin bipolar electrodes. The method involved stacking the desired thin conductor onto a thicker one, thereby creating a pseudo-single electrode whose width is the sum of the two.…”