A Facile Method for Synthesizing Graphene Polyaniline Composite for Supercapacitor Electrode Fabrication and Its Enhanced Performance Evaluation

The research community in the area of energy storage technology is more focused on supercapacitors (SC) because of its notable features like storing a high amount of energy, excellent cyclability, quick charging feature, and high current delivering capability in a smaller footprint. Graphene and polyaniline (PANI) are the two primary candidates under supercapacitor materials research coming below carbon and polymer groups. Graphene has exceptionally good electrical and mechanical properties, and polyaniline is one of the best-conducting semi-flexible polymers. The normal route for making graphene polyaniline composite is time consuming, and hence we conducted a facile method for fabricating the graphene PANI composites for the preparation of supercapacitor electrodes. The SEM, TEM, FTIR, Raman, and XRD results showed good intercalation between graphene and PANI. Also, the SEM images showed the graphene surface is coated with PANI nanofibers. The CV results exhibited excellent electrochemical performance and capacitance retention ratio. The specific capacitance observed from cyclic voltammetry was 235.4, 179.2, 120.4, 84.8, and 55.0 F/g at various scan rates of 10, 20, 50, 100, and 200 mV/s respectively. Moreover, the capacitance retention ratio was more than 90% after 1000 cycles.