Designing of Fe3O4-supported reduced graphene oxide-based 1-D copper(ii) polymeric materials: a comparative study on high-performance supercapacitive behaviour

Abstract

Exploring the electrochemical activities of Schiff base transition metal complexes and their usage as energy storage devices, namely, electrical double layer capacitors (EDLCs), has drawn much attention owing to the day-by-day evolving demand of more practical and convenient energy storage systems. With this aim, we synthesized and compared the electrochemical activity of a dicyanamide-bridged 1D Cu²⁺-coordination polymer (CuL-dca) using an N,N,O donor ligand prepared from 2-pyridylethanamine and 5-bromo-2-hydroxybenzaldehyde with its heterogeneous nanocomposite on Fe₃O₄-decorated reduced graphene oxide. The heterogenization was carried out by anchoring CuL-dca onto magnetic Fe₃O₄ nanomaterials supported by a reduced graphene oxide bed (rGO@Fe₃O₄@CuL-dca). The material was characterized using different physicochemical techniques like single-crystal X-ray diffraction, FT-IR spectroscopy, UV-vis spectroscopy, ESI-MS spectrometry, TEM, EDX, PXRD and XPS spectroscopy. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first report on the rGO@Fe₃O₄@CuL-dca heterostructure, which exhibits superior supercapacitor performance with a specific capacitance of 574 F g⁻¹ at 5 mV s⁻¹ in a half-cell and 270 F g⁻¹ at 50 mA g⁻¹ in a symmetric full-cell configuration.