Flexible heterostructured supercapacitor electrodes based on α-Fe2O3 nanosheets with excellent electrochemical performances.

In this paper, two kinds of hybrid α-Fe2O3@Co3O4 and α-Fe2O3@MnCo2O4 composites with high yield have been successfully synthesized on a flexible carbon cloth via simple solution methods. These as-obtained products serve as supercapacitor electrodes without the use of any adscititious surfactants and binders. These two hybrid electrode architectures make full use of the synergistic effects between α-Fe2O3 frameworks and coated Co3O4 or MnCo2O4 layers. They exhibit obviously enhanced discharge areal capacitance of 490 mF cm(-2) and 1073 mF cm(-2) for α-Fe2O3@Co3O4 and α-Fe2O3@MnCo2O4 composites at 1 mA cm(-2) with an identical potential voltage of 0-0.9 V. Long-life cycling stability with capacitance retention of 74.6% for α-Fe2O3@Co3O4 and 77.8% for α-Fe2O3@MnCo2O4 are presented after 6000 charge/discharge cycles, respectively. Such prominent electrochemical performances are mainly ascribed to the hybrid composites, which can provide a large reaction surface area, fast ion and electron transfer and good structure combination stability. The as-synthesized flexible hybrid composites might have promising applications in micro/nanoscale energy storage devices.