Chemically building interpenetrating polymeric networks of Bi-crosslinked hydrogel macromolecules for membrane supercapacitors

Macromolecular polymer hydrogels used in flexible supercapacitors and batteries have attracted extensive attention in recent years. In this paper, we use a simple polymer interpenetrating technology involving covalent cross-linking and non-covalent cross-linking aspects based on polyvinyl alcohol and carboxylated chitosan to prepare a flexible polymer hydrogel membrane for supercapacitor. The obtained hydrogel membrane has good flexibility and high ionic conductivity of 2.561 x 10(-2) s.cm(-1). The hydrogel electrode membrane prepared by in-situ polymerization of aniline exhibits an area specific capacitance of 580 mF.cm(-2) at a current density of 0.5 mA.cm(-2). And the symmetric all-gel-state supercapacitor with hydrogel membrane as the gel electrolyte shows a high specific capacitance of 325 mF.cm(-2) at 1.0 mA.cm(-2). We believe that this hydrogel film has considerable application prospects in flexible wearable electronic devices.

Automated summary

The flexible polymer hydrogel membrane prepared using a simple polymer interpenetrating technology involving covalent and non-covalent cross-linking based on polyvinyl alcohol and carboxylated chitosan shows good flexibility and high ionic conductivity. The hydrogel electrode membrane has a high area specific capacitance and the symmetric all-gel-state supercapacitor with the hydrogel membrane as the gel electrolyte exhibits a high specific capacitance, indicating promising application prospects in flexible wearable electronic devices.