Free-Standing Conducting Polymer Films for High-Performance Energy Devices

Thick, uniform, easily processed, highly conductive polymer films are desirable as electrodes for solar cells as well as polymer capacitors. Here, a novel scalable strategy is developed to prepare highly conductive thick poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene):polystyrene sulfonate (HCT-PEDOT:PSS) films with layered structure that display a conductivity of 1400 S cm−1 and a low sheet resistance of 0.59 ohm sq−1. Organic solar cells with laminated HCT-PEDOT:PSS exhibit a performance comparable to the reference devices with vacuum-deposited Ag top electrodes. More importantly, the HCT-PEDOT:PSS film delivers a specific capacitance of 120 F g−1 at a current density of 0.4 A g−1. All-solid-state flexible symmetric supercapacitors with the HCT-PEDOT:PSS films display a high volumetric energy density of 6.80 mWh cm−3 at a power density of 100 mW cm−3 and 3.15 mWh cm−3 at a very high power density of 16160 mW cm−3 that outperforms previous reported solid-state supercapacitors based on PEDOT materials.