Novel method of preparing hierarchical porous CoFe2O4 by the citric acid-assisted sol-gel auto-combustion for supercapacitors

In this work, the hierarchical porous CoFe2O4 was fabricated by the citric acid-assisted sol-gel auto-combustion method. The hierarchical porous CoFe2O4 was applied as supercapacitor's electrode and exhibited good electrochemical properties. The specific capacitance of CoFe2O4 electrode can rich 443.89 F g−1 at current density of 1 A g−1, and 75.12% capacitance was still retained at current density of 16 A g−1 compared with 1 A g−1. The cycling stability was excellent, which degraded by 20.65% after 6000 cycles. The results suggest that the synthesized hierarchical porous CoFe2O4 was a promising candidate for application to supercapacitors electrodes. Meanwhile, the novel citric acid-assisted sol-gel auto-combustion is low manufacturing cost, simple in preparation, easy to control the stoichiometric ratio, which can be further extended to synthesize other inorganic materials.