Polyaniline–polypyrrole nanocomposites using a green and porous wood as support for supercapacitors

Abstract

Wood is an ideal type of support material whose porous structure and surface functional groups are beneficial for deposition of various guest substances for different applications. In this paper, wood is employed as a porous support, combined with two kinds of conductive polymers (i.e., polyaniline (PANI) and polypyrrole (PPy)) using an easy and fast liquid polymerization method. Scanning electron microscope observations indicate that the PANI–PPy complex consists of nanoparticles with a size of ~20 nm. The interactions between oxygen-containing groups of the wood and the nitrogen composition of PANI–PPy were verified by Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy. The self-supported PANI–PPy/wood composite is capable of acting as a free-standing supercapacitor electrode, which delivers a high gravimetric specific capacitance of 360 F·g⁻¹ at 0.2 A·g⁻¹.

Keywords

wood / polypyrrole / polyaniline / supercapacitors / nanocomposites

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Acknowledgements

This study was supported by the Fundamental Research Funds for the Central Universities (2572018AB09) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31470584).

Compliance with ethics guidelines

Jian Li and Yue Jiao declare that they have no conflicts of interest or financial conflicts to disclose.

This article does not contain any studies with human or animal subjects performed by the any of the authors.

RIGHTS & PERMISSIONS

The Author(s) 2019. Published by Higher Education Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0)