Nitrogen doped graphene paper as a highly conductive, and light-weight substrate for flexible supercapacitors

Abstract

In this work, we fabricated a lightweight (1.25 g cm⁻³) N doped reduced graphene (N-RGO) paper through a combined method of vacuum filtration and thermal treatment under an ammonia atmosphere. 0.48% of N has been uniformly incorporated into the graphene sheets, which results in an inherent improvement in conductivity. Simultaneously, the as-fabricated N-RGO paper possesses excellent flexibility without any effect on its electronic properties. Furthermore, the good performance of N-RGO as a supercapacitor electrode was also demonstrated with a high specific capacitance of 280 F g⁻¹ at 5 mV s⁻¹. The N-RGO electrode also exhibited a remarkable long-term cycling stability with 99.4% capacitance retention after 40 000 cycles. This work constitutes the first attempt of applying N-doping to improve the electronic properties and electrochemical performance for graphene paper.