Conducting polymers have attracted considerable attention for electrochemical capacitors because of the combination of high capacitance compared with carbon-based material and low cost compared with metal oxides. Polyaniline (PANI) is one of the most studied conducting polymers due to its high electronic conductivity, redox and ion-exchange properties, high electroactivity, and facile synthesis routes. However, conductive polymers, particularly polyaniline suffers from low cyclic stability, which hinders its application in commercial supercapacitors. Increasing cyclic stability of polyaniline in electrochemical capacitors is still a challenge in the area of energy material for electrochemical capacitors. The common method for improving supercapacitive performance of polyaniline is the synthesis of its composite with carbon-based material such as graphene or CNT. In this project, we address this challenge by incorporating melamine monomers into polyaniline through interfacial polymerization of aniline-melamine. In this project, we learned that melamine-aniline copolymer exhibits substantially higher cycle life compared to pure polyaniline in supercapacitors. We also noticed that the copolymer with more content of melamine shows higher capacitance and cycle life than the one with lower melamine.

In the other effort towards formation of electrochemically stable polyaniline-based electrode materials for supercapacitors, polyaniline is grafted to the amino-functionalized graphene aerogel. Generated amine functional groups employed as an anchoring site for polyaniline via a grafting-from strategy in order to maximize compatibility between components by fabricating a 3D conductive network with efficient electron transmittance and high surface area. The optimized functionalized graphene aerogel-polyaniline showed enhanced capacitance, cycle life, rate capability.