Self-support wood-derived carbon/polyaniline composite for high-performance supercapacitor electrodes

Wood-derived carbon is a neoteric self-supporter electrode material for supercapacitors or batteries. To improve the electrochemical characteristics, polyaniline (PANI) was deposited on wood carbon (WC) by an in-situ polymerization method. The sandwich-like symmetrical solid-state supercapacitor was developed by preparing WC/PANI composites and their electrochemical properties were examined. The device showed an excellent capacity retention and displayed the maximum specific capacitance of $$22.5\,\hbox {mF cm}^-2$$ at a scan rate of $$10~\hbox {mV s}^-1$$ . It was also demonstrated an excellent electrical conductivity and an outstanding retention of $${\sim }82\%$$ . It was suggested that the PANI accommodated into WC without any significant morphological change during the charge–discharge cycling of the hybrid WC-based composites. The microstructure and chemical structure of WC/PANI composites were also characterized by the Fourier-transform infrared, Raman spectroscopy and X-ray diffraction techniques.