Facile fabrication of hollow polyaniline spheres and its application in supercapacitor

Polyaniline (PANI) is a promising electroactive material for pseudocapacitor due to the existence of the electronic conjugation structure. Here we demonstrate a novel approach to prepare hollow polyaniline nanospheres. In this process, uniform poly (methyl methacrylate- butyl methacrylate - methacrylic acid) (PMMA-PBMA-PMAA) latex microspheres as self-sacrificial templates were rapidly prepared through an emulsion polymerization method. Then the hollow PANI (H-PANI) nanospheres were obtained directly through an in-situ chemical oxidative polymerization of aniline in the presence of PMMA-PBMA-PMAA microspheres, which can be explained by the “dissolution” of templates and phase separation between the constituent polymers. The structure and morphology of the nanophase materials have been characterized by field-emission scanning electron microscopy (FESEM), transmission electron microscopy (TEM), X-ray photoelectron spectroscopy (XPS) and Fourier transform infrared (FT-IR) spectra. The specific capacitance of H-PANI is 485.5 F g−1 at 1 A g−1 and there is 69% performance attenuation after 500 cycles, which show a promising electrochemical performance.