Preparation of hybrid paper electrode based on hexagonal boron nitride integrated graphene nanocomposite for free-standing flexible supercapacitors

Abstract

Flexible energy storage devices have received great interest due to the increasing demand for wearable and flexible electronic devices with high-power energy sources. Herein, a novel hybrid flexible hexagonal boron nitride integrated graphene paper (BN/GrP) is fabricated from 2D hexagonal boron nitride (h-BN) nanosheets integrated with graphene sheets dispersion via a simple vacuum filtration method. FE-SEM indicated that layered graphene nanosheets tightly confined with h-BN nanosheets. Further, the Raman spectroscopy confirmed successful integration of BN with graphene. As-prepared BN/GrP free-standing flexible conductive paper showed high electrical conductivity of 5.36 × 10⁴ S m⁻¹ with the sheet resistance of 8.87 Ω sq⁻¹. However, after 1000 continuous bending cycles, the BN/GrP sheet resistance increased just about 8.7% which indicated good flexibility of the paper. Furthermore, as-prepared BN/GrP showed excellent specific capacitance of 321.95 F g⁻¹ at current density of 0.5 A g⁻¹. In addition, the power and energy densities were obtained as 3588.3 W kg⁻¹, and 44.7 W h kg⁻¹, respectively. The stability of the prepared flexible electrode was tested in galvanostatic charge/discharge cycles, where the results showed the 96.3% retention even after 6000 cycles. These results exhibited that the proposed BN/GrP may be useful to prepare flexible energy-storage systems.