Controllable growth of polyaniline nanowire arrays on hierarchical macro/mesoporous graphene foams for high-performance flexible supercapacitors

Abstract Free-standing hierarchical macro/mesoporous flexible graphene foam have been constructed by rational intergration ofwell dispersed graphene oxide sheets and amino-modified polystyrene (PS) spheres through a facile “ templating and embossing ” technique. The three dimensional (3D) macro/mesoporous flexible graphene foam not only inherits the uniform porous structures of graphene foam, but also contains hierarchical macro/mesopores on the struts by sacrificing PS spheres and the activation of KOH, which could providing rapid pathways for ionic and electronic transport to high specific capacitance. Vertically polyaniline (PANI) nanowire arrays are then uniformly deposited onto the hierarchical macro/mesoporous graphene foam(fRGO-F/PANI) by a simple in situ polymerization, which show a high specific capacitance of 939 F g −1 . Thanks to the synergistic function of 3D bicontinuous hierarchical porous structure of graphene foam and effective immobilization of PANI nanowires on the struts, the assembled symmetric supercapctior with fRGO-F/PANI as electrodes exhibits a maximum energy density and power density of 20.9 Wh kg −1 and 103.2 kW kg −1 , respectively. Moreover, it also displays an excellent cyclic stability with a 88.7% retention after 5000 cycles.