Research progress on conducting polymer based supercapacitor electrode materials

Abstract Supercapacitors, known as ultracapacitors, have been supposed to be one of the most promising candidates to meet requirements of human’s sustainable development, due to their advantages such as high capacitance and rate capability, long cycle life and low processing cost. Electrode materials play a decisive role on performance of supercapacitors, thus researches on electrode materials are critical to supercapacitors. Conducting polymer (CP) -based materials exhibit high potential in supercapacitors because of their unique advantages including good conductivity, flexibility, relatively cheap, easy of synthesis and so on. This review summarizes recent research progress of CPs (including polypyrrole (PPy), polyaniline (PANi), and polythiophene (PTh)), the CP-based binary composite, and the CP-based ternary composite electrode for supercapacitors. In the end, we give a brief outline of development directions of CP-based supercapacitors in the future.