Polyaniline as Proficient Electrode Material for Supercapacitor Applications: PANI Nanocomposites for Supercapacitor Applications

Aim of Supercapacitors

Ever mounting energy needs, increasing environmental pollution and depleting of conventional energy resources, have urged the progress of renewable, sustainable energy production with environmental benign systems for the last three decades. Great efforts have been committed in developing rechargeable, secondary batteries so as to be able to store energy for autonomy purposes (Yoo, Markevich & Salitra, 2014) (Tarascon & Armand, 2001). However, to cope up with the sky-high demands for portable-miniatured electronics systems and hybrid-electric vehicles, short-pulsed-high power requirements have ideally motivated the current research on electrochemical capacitors (Burke, 2000). The electrochemical capacitors, more famously recognized as supercapacitors or “supercaps” or ultracapacitors, are observed to display longer cycle, faster charging/discharging rate with appreciable energy and power densities along with low maintenance cost. However, energy densities of current supercapacitors are very unsatisfactory compared to secondary batteries (Kotz & Carlen, 2000). So, present research concentrates on improving the limitations of the supercapacitors preserving all its advantages to full extent. Some of the points of superiority of the supercapacitors over secondary batteries are well reflected in the following comparative study as depicted in Table-1: Comparison of Supercapacitors with Secondary Batteries (Chu and Braatz, 2002).