Electrodeposited nickel-cobalt sulfide nanosheet on polyacrylonitrile nanofibers: A binder-free electrode for flexible supercapacitors

To pursue high-performance energy storage devices with both high energy density and power density, one-dimensional (1D) nanostructures play a key role in the development of functional devices including energy conversion, energy storage, and environmental devices. The polyacrylonitrile (PAN) nanofibers were obtained by the versatile electrospinning method. An ultra-thin nickel-cobalt sulfide (NiCoS) layer was conformably electrodeposited on a self-standing PAN nanofibers by cyclic voltammetry to fabricate the light-weighted porous electrodes for supercapacitors. The porous web of PAN nanofibers acts as a high-surface-area scaffold with significant electrochemical performance, while the electrodeposition of metal sulfide nanosheet further enhances the specific capacitance. The fabricated NiCoS on PAN (NiCoS/PAN) nanofibers exhibits a very high capacitance of 1513 F g^-1 at 5 A g^-1 in 1 M potassium chloride (KCl) aqueous electrolyte with superior rate capability and excellent electrochemical stability as a hybrid electrode. The high capacitance of the NiCoS is attributed to the large surface area of the electrospun PAN nanofibers scaffold, which has offered a large number of active sites for possible redox reaction of ultra-thin NiCoS layer. Benefiting from the compositional features and electrode architectures, the hybrid electrode of NiCoS/PAN nanofibers shows greatly improved electrochemical performance with an ultra-high capacitance (1124 F g^-1 at 50 A g^-1). Moreover, a binder-free asymmetric supercapacitor device is also fabricated by using NiCoS/PAN nanofibers as the positive electrode and activated carbon (MSP-20) on PAN nanofibers as the negative electrode; this demonstrates high energy density of 56.904 W h kg^-1 at a power density of 1.445 kW kg^-1, and it still delivers the energy density of 33.3923 W h kg^-1 even at higher power density of 16.5013 kW kg^-1.