Hydrogen bond strategy designed textile composite electrodes for supercapacitor with highly efficient utilization of polypyrrole

Textile/polypyrrole (PPy) composite electrode fabricated by chemical polymerization satisfied flexible, mechanically robust, and easy large-scale preparation. Although there has been recent process towards high performance textile/PPy electrode, the realization of high-performance electrode has focused mainly on high mass loading of PPy, combing with metal oxide, or by electrochemical polymerization method. Here, an alternative design idea for chemical polymerization method based on improving efficiency utilization of PPy from hydrogen bond strategy is presented, in which three different strength of hydrogen bonded textile/PPy electrodes with the same amount of PPy are prepared. The systematic studies have shown that highly efficiency utilization of PPy is associated with the hydrogen bond strategy, in which combination of ordered arrangement of PPy chain, crosslinked and porous PPy nanostructure, and interfacial hydrogen bond integrated feature. This unique structure of PPy serves to decrease the interfacial resistance and increase the efficiency of ion and electron transferring, thus leading to specific capacitance increases from 230 to 417 mF cm−2 (scan rate of 20 mV s−1), energy density of its aqueous devices improved from 9.8 to 16.9 Wh kg−1 (power density of 100 W kg−1), and cycling durability increase from 74% to 96% after 4000 charge/discharge cycles associated with interfacial hydrogen bonds.