Intense pulsed light-assisted facile and agile fabrication of cobalt oxide/nickel cobaltite nanoflakes on nickel-foam for high performance supercapacitor applications

We report an extremely efficient method for fabricating high-performance supercapacitive CoO/NiCo2O4 nanoflakes on Ni-foam substrate by using intense pulsed light (IPL) technology. Structural and morphological characterization is carried out using X-ray diffraction (XRD) and scanning and transmission electron microscopies (SEM and TEM). These reveal that hierarchically structured CoO/NiCo2O4 nanoflakes of 150-200 nm in size and a thickness around 10 nm are formed on Ni-foam substrate by IPL irradiation with energy of 20 J cm(-2) for 15 ms. The electrochemical behavior of the composites is analyzed by cyclic voltammetry and galvanostatic charge-discharge experiments. The IPL-induced CoO/NiCo2O4/Ni-foam electrode exhibits a very high specific capacitance of 2163 Fg(-1) at a discharge current density of 1 Ag-1 and a good rate performance of 908 Fg(-1) even at 50 Ag-1. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.