Anti-Shedding Nickel-Protection-Layer Boosting an Ultrahigh Loading Carbon Fiber@Co–NiSx Electrode to Deliver Superior Areal/Volumetric/Gravimetric Capacitance

Challenges remain to show good capacitive performance while achieving high loadings of active materials for supercapacitors. Trying to realize this version, a nickel-protecting carbon fiber paper@Co-doped NiSx (Ni-CP@Co–NiSx) electrode with high specific gravimetric, areal, and volumetric capacitance is reported in this work. This free-standing electrode is prepared by an electroplating-hydrothermal-electroplating (EHE) three-step method to achieve a high loading of almost 26.7 mg cm–2. The cobalt-doping and nickel-protection strategies effectively decrease the impedance and inhibit the active material dropping from the electrode resulting from the expansion stress, which endows the Ni-CP@Co–NiSx electrode with a high rate and good cycling performance, especially with an ultrahigh specific areal/volumetric/gravimetric capacitance of 53.3 F cm–2/2807 F cm–3/1997 F g–1 at 5 mA cm–2, respectively. Employing activated carbon functionalized with riboflavin (AC/VB2) as a negative electrode, the asymmetric supercapacitor device delivers a very high energy density of up to 60.4 W h kg–1. This work demonstrates that electrodes with a high loading density and excellent performance can be obtained by the combination of the EHE method to adjust the internal conductivity and external structural stability.