High-performance supercapacitors based on free-standing SiC@PEDOT nanowires with robust cycling stability

Abstract Conductive polymers as one of the candidate materials with pseudocapacitor behavior have inspired wide attentions, because of their high conductivity, flexibility, low cost and excellent processability. However, the intrinsically poor cycling stability induced by the volume change over the doping/dedoping redox process limits their practical applications. Herein, we report the exploration of electrodes with robust cycling capacity for supercapacitors (SCs), which are rationally designed by coating conductive poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) (PEDOT) around free-standing SiC nanowires using an all-dry oxidative chemical vaper deposition (oCVD) method. The as-constructed SiC@PEDOT nanowire architecture enables a specific capacitance of 26.53 mF/cm2 at 0.2 mA/cm2, which is ~370% to that of SiC nanowire counterpart (7.04 mF/cm2). Moreover, their aqueous-based SCs exhibit robust cycling stability with 104% capacity retention after 10000 cycles, which is among the highest values achieved for PEDOT-based SCs.