In situ electrodeposition of nickel cobalt sulfide/double hydroxide heterostructure on carbon cloth as a binder-free electrode for supercapacitors

Construction of heterostructure free-standing electrodes with excellent electrochemical performance has become a hot-spot direction for supercapacitor (SC) application recently. However, the preparation of core-shell heterostructure via traditional hydrothermal or chemical bath deposition usually suffers from process complexity and time-consuming. To improve the efficiency, here, a simple two-step electrodeposition is applied to construct nickel cobalt sulfide/double hydroxide core-shell heterostructure on carbon cloth (CC) (denoted as NCS@NCOH/CC) to serve as a binder-free electrode for supercapacitors. Benefited from the high conductivity of NCS layer and nanoporous microstructure of NCOH layer as well as the high capacitances of them, the resultant NCS@NCOH/CC electrode can deliver a specific capacitance of 805.0 F g −1 at 3 A g −1 , which can maintain 571 F g −1 at 30 A g −1 , corresponding to a retention rate of 70.9%. When successively charging and discharging under 10 A g −1 for 7000 cycles, a capacitance retention of 77.5% can be obtained, demonstrating its good cycling performance. This work presents a feasible strategy for assembling NCS@NCOH heterostructure by electrodeposition as a binder-free electrode for energy storage devices.