Covalent polyaniline nanoarrays on MXene/cotton textile electrode with hierarchical porous structure for flexible and deformable supercapacitor applications

Abstract

Designing lightweight, flexible, and wearable sustainable electric-power sources have attracted increasing attention, because of the rapid development of portable electronics. Here, the hierarchical and flexible polyaniline (PANI) @ Ti3C2Tx MXene modified cotton (PANI@MXene/cotton) textile electrode was prepared by layer-by-layer deposition treatment. The cotton skeleton endows good mechanical property and tailorable capability for electrode. What’s more, covering Ti3C2Tx layer on the surface of cotton textile proves rich sites for PANI deposition and successive conductive pathways for rapid electron transfer. Besides, in situ polymerization PANI networks can not only effectively enhance the amounts of redox sites accelerating the ion adsorption, but also form a stable chemical bond facilitating the electron transfer. Moreover, the constructed hierarchical architectures provide higher specific surface area and interconnected channels for ion diffusion. Thanks for the synergistic effect between the heterogeneous materials, the PANI@MXene/cotton textile electrode presents high capacitance of 287.61 F g-1 at 1 A g-1 and excellent rate performance (95.72 F g-1 at 10 A g-1) in 1 M H2SO4 electrolyte. After assembling the symmetric all-solid-state textile shaped supercapacitors, the device shows a maximum energy density of 3.47 Wh g-1, stable long-term cycling (96.2% capacitance retention after 2500 cycles) and outstanding deformation endurance. Thus, the as-designed PANI@MXene/cotton textile based electrode is of great potential for the next-generation multi-functional textile electronics.