A novel method to synthesize BiSI uniformly coated with rGO by chemical bonding and its application as a supercapacitor electrode material

Abstract

In this paper, we demonstrate a novel synthetic route to assemble reduced graphene oxide (rGO) uniformly coated on BiSI composite and investigate its potential as the active electrode material for supercapacitors. In this strategy, graphene oxide (GO) was not a simple physical mixture with the BiSI material but bismuth cations were uniformly anchored on the surface of GO by chemical bonding during material growth and the size of GO can determine the final size of rGO coated BiSI composite. The galvanostatic charge–discharge measurement results show that the BiSI–rGO electrode has a maximum specific capacity of 234 C g⁻¹ at the current density of 1 A g⁻¹ and excellent capacity retention of 92.4% after 2000 cycles. In situ XANES and EXAFS were employed to study the electrochemical oxidation and reduction processes of the bismuth-based material with rGO coating and investigate the origins of the structural stabilities. The results show that our novel rGO coating route can not only significantly increase the capacity but also improve cycling stability.