Chemically building interpenetrating polymeric networks of Bi-crosslinked hydrogel macromolecules for membrane...

Macromolecular polymer hydrogels used in flexible supercapacitors and batteries have attracted extensive attention in recent years. In this paper, we use a simple polymer interpenetrating technology involving covalent cross-linking and non-covalent cross-linking aspects based on polyvinyl alcohol and carboxylated chitosan to prepare a flexible polymer hydrogel membrane for supercapacitor. The obtained hydrogel membrane has good flexibility and high ionic conductivity of 2.561×10^-2 s·cm^-1. The hydrogel electrode membrane prepared by in-situ polymerization of aniline exhibits an area specific capacitance of 580 mF·cm^-2 at a current density of 0.5 mA·cm^-2. And the symmetric all-gel-state supercapacitor with hydrogel membrane as the gel electrolyte shows a high specific capacitance of 325 mF·cm^-2 at 1.0 mA·cm^-2. We believe that this hydrogel film has considerable application prospects in flexible wearable electronic devices.