Improvement of capacitive performances of symmetric carbon/carbon supercapacitors by addition of nanostructured polypyrrole powder

A nanostructured polypyrrole powder was synthesized in a previous work from the oxidation of pyrrole by a nanostructured MnO2 powder used simultaneously as an oxidizing agent and a sacrificial template in a redox heterogeneous mechanism. In this study, this original PPy powder was used as an active additive material with different ratio in carbon/carbon symmetrical supercapacitors whose performances were studied by cyclic voltammetry and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS) using a Swagelok-type cell. From the EIS spectra, the complex capacitance was extracted using a model involving two Cole-Cole type complex capacitances linked in series. The specific capacitance values evaluated by EIS and cyclic voltammetry are in a good agreement between them. The results show that the addition of nanostructured polypyrrole powder improves significantly the specific capacitance of the carbon electrode and consequently the performances of carbon/carbon supercapacitors. The original and versatile synthesis method used to produce this polypyrrole powder appears to be attractive for large scale production of promising additives for electrode materials of supercapacitors. (C) 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.