4-Butylbenzenesulfonate modified polypyrrole paper for supercapacitor with exceptional cycling stability

Abstract Polypyrrole (PPy) is a highly conductive polymer and promising pseudocapacitive material for energy storage. However, the poor stability of PPy based supercapacitors (SCs) limits their applications. Here we demonstrate a facile dipping process to uniformly grow 4-butylbenzenesulfonate modified PPy film on a filter paper substrate. The flexible and free-standing PPy paper electrode demonstrated excellent cycling stability with capacitance retention of ~84.8% after 200,000 cycles. We believe that the 4-butylbenzenesulfonate modification could increase the order degree of PPy via layer-by-layer stacked α-α coupled chains, leading to a robust structure under the charging and discharging progress. This work pushes the cycling limitation of PPy based SCs and realizes their potentials for practical applications.