Facile synthesis of nanostructured bismuth oxide on nickel foam with outstanding electrochemical behavior for supercapacitor application

Utilizing green technology to realize efficient energy storage for supercapacitor is an extremely popular issue at present. Herein, bismuth oxide nanoparticles grown on nickel foam substrates (BN) are successfully synthesized using a facile electrodeposition technique followed by a low temperature calcination process and thereby employed as superior electrodes for high-performance supercapacitors. The influences of electrodeposition time and carbonization temperature on the electrochemical performances of BN samples have been studied. The BN-8–300 electrode is prepared with the optimized conditions of deposition time 8 min and annealing temperature 300 °C which exhibits the largest specific capacities (1223.9 C g−1 at 1 A g−1) as well as a satisfactory cycling performance (86.8% capacity retention at 4 A g−1) after 5000 cycles. Furthermore, the symmetric supercapacitor is fabricated utilizing two identical BN-8–300 electrodes which presents an energy density as high as 86.4 Wh kg−1 at the power density of 497.9 W kg−1 coupled with an outstanding cyclic stability (82.6% of its original capacitance after 5000 cycles). This facile synthetic strategy manifests a great promising application in developing innovative, durable and inexpensive bismuth oxide-based electrodes for energy storage devices.