Dye Wastewater Cleanup by Graphene Composite Paper for Tailorable Supercapacitors

Currently, the energy crisis and environmental pollution are two critical challenges confronted by humans. The development of smart strategies to address the above-mentioned issues simultaneously is significant. As the main accomplices for water pollution, several kinds of organic dyes with intrinsic redox functional groups such as phenothiazines derivatives, anthraquinone, and indigoid dyes are potential candidates for the replacement of the conventional pseudocapacitive materials. In this work, three typical organic dyes can be efficiently removed by a facile adsorption procedure using reduced graphene oxide coated cellulose fiber (rGO@CF) paper. Flexible supercapacitors based on dye/rGO@CF electrodes exhibit excellent electrochemical performances that are superior to or comparable with those of conventional pseudocapacitive materials based devices, presenting a new type of promising electrode materials. Moreover, benefiting from the high flexibility and considerable mechanical strength of the graphene composite paper, the operating potential and capacitance of the devices can be easily adjusted by tailoring the hybrid electrodes into different specific shapes followed by rational integrating. The smart design of these dye/rGO@CF paper based electrodes shows that energy storage and environmental remediation can be achieved simultaneously.