Porous polyvinyl chloride films as substrate for polyaniline-based flexible and robust free-standing electrodes for high performance supercapacitors

Polymeric materials have been recognized as flexible substrate for free-standing electrodes in energy storage devices. Here, porous polyvinyl chloride (PVC) films with different porous diameters were designed via solution-coating method with ZnO powder and polyethylene glycol (PEG) as pore-forming agent, respectively. After in situ chemical oxidation polymerization of aniline, the polyvinyl chloride/polyaniline (PVC/PANI) composite films were obtained as flexible and robust free-standing electrode materials for high performance supercapacitors. Based on the optimization of the kind and addition amount of pore-forming agent, feeding amount of aniline, and polymerization strategy, the optimized microporous Z-PVC/PANI-2 composite film possessed the best comprehensive performance owing to its uniform microporous surface, including electrical conductivity of 18.2 S cm−1 at room temperature, high specific capacitance of 533.7 F g−1 (areal capacitance of 688 mF cm−2 of the composite film) at a current density of 1 A g−1, good rate capacitance properties retaining 63.3% at a high current density of 10 A g−1 and 58.2% at a scan rate of 100 mV s−1 and excellent long-term electrochemical stability retaining 95.0% after 2000 CV cycles, together with the excellent flexibility and tensile tolerance performance with capacitance retention of 92.0% after 100 cycles of 180°-bending, 76.8% at stress of 9.5 MPa for 5 min and 57.2% for 60 min.