Fabrication of N-doped carbon coated spinel copper cobalt sulfide hollow spheres to realize the improvement of electrochemical performance for supercapacitors

Abstract Metal sulfides with spinel structures have been considered as promising materials for supercapacitors and attracted increasing attentions of researchers over the past few years. However, inherent defects of metal sulfides such as poor electric conductivity and cyclic stability limit the practical application. Herein, we present a facile strategy to fabricate N-doped carbon coated spinel copper cobalt sulfide hollow spheres with remarkable electrochemical performance. A kind of Cu–Co coordination polymer spheres was utilized as template and metal precursor, polydopamine modified on the surface of the spheres was the source of N-doped carbon. The optimized hybrid materials exhibit high specific capacitance (1228 F g−1 at 1 A g−1) and outstanding cyclic stability (retaining 81.5% of the initial capacitance after 10000 cycles at 20 A g−1). The result demonstrates that this hybrid material is a promising electrode material to realize high performance supercapacitors.