Synthesis and Electrochemical Characterization of Cadmium Sulfide-Polyaniline Composite

Abstract

Polyaniline is vastly studied material for supercapacitors because of its high theoretical specific capacitance environmental stability. This research work was aimed to fabricate a composite of polyaniline (PANI) and cadmium sulfide (CdS) followed by its modification by graphene nanoplatelets (GNP) to develop a ternary composite electrode. This composite of CdS/GNP/PANI was successfully synthesized through hydrothermal method and confirmed by XRD and FTIR techniques. The electrochemical studies were carried out using cyclic voltammetry (CV) under different set of conditions. The parameters such as specific capacitance and energy density were calculated. Polyaniline alone showed a specific capacitance of 263Fg-1 and energy density of 36 Whkg-1 at 2mVs-1. The binary composite, GNP/PANI, showed specific capacitance of 540Fg-1 and the energy density of 75 Whkg-1 at 2mVs-1. The ternary composite of CdS/GNP/PANI displayed a specific capacitance of 713 Fg-1 and energy density of 99Whkg-1 at 2mVs-1 . The stability of this ternary composite was checked for 1000 consecutive cycles and it was found that after 1000 cycles it still retains 82% of its specific capacitance. The improvement in the specific capacitance clearly indicated the role of CdS nanoparticles and GNPs and the outcome is interpreted accordingly