Preparation And Electrochemical Performance Of Interconnected Porous Carbon/polyaniline Composite As Electrode Materials

Supercapacitor has been paid more and more attention for that it is a new greentype of storage energy cell with higher energy density and power density. Theelectrodes have been playing a key role in supercapacitor. Carbon materials arewidely used as electrode because of its good conductivity and low cost, however, itsspecific capacitance is low. Conducive polymer materials become one of hot topicsdue to its high faradaic capacitance, low cost and friendly environment, unfortunately,its cycle life is poor. The composite of carbon/polyaniline is a kind of excellentelectrode materials due to the synergistic effect of the components. In this paper, theinterconnected porous carbon was synthesized by high internal phase emulsion (HIPE)method and was used as support to preparing the composite. The electrochemicalperformance the interconnected porous carbon and its composite were studied,respectively.The interconnected porous polymer was synthesized with styrene anddivinyl-benzene as raw materials and then, interconnected porous carbon wasobtained after carbonation of interconnected porous polymer. Its structure wascharacterized by SEM, BET, FTIR and its electrochemical performance was studied.The porous structure of interconnected porous carbon was controlled by variety of thedisperse phase volume in HIPE, and the interconnected porous carbon was modifiedby liquid solvent with chemical oxidation. The results show that, there existed aproper dispersed phase volume in synthesis of interconnected porous carbon with thepore size contained micropore, mesopore and macropore simultaneously. Its specificcapacitance was up to95F/g in alkaline electrolyte, improved to225F/g afterliquid-phase oxidation modification. It had good cycle life of90%of initial specificcapacitance after1000cycles.The interconnected porous carbon/polyaniline composite was synthesized bychemical oxidation. Reaction time and aniline amount has influence on the structureand morphology of composite. Its structure was characterized by SEM, BET and FTIR,and the electrochemical performance was characterized by electrochemical station.The results show that, the polyaniline nanofiber was changing and the specificcapacitance was first increased, then decreased with the reaction time and aniline initial addition amount increasing. The highest specific capacitance of238F/g waslower than that of pure polyaniline of405F/g, but the composite had lower chargetransfer impedance and good stability than pure polyaniline.