Enhancing the supercapacitive properties of iron oxide electrode through Cu 2+ -doping: Cathodic electrosynthesis and characterization

Abstract

Cu2+ doped iron oxide nanoparticles (Cu-IONPs) are prepared via a one-step facile electrodeposition procedure. In this procedure, Cu-IONPs are electro-deposited in a two-electrode set up from an additive-free aqueous solution of mixed Fe(NO3)3, FeCl2 and CuCl2 salts. The applied deposition parameters were current density of 10 mA cm-2, bath temperature of 25°C and deposition time of 30 min. The structural and morphological characterizations through X-ray diffraction (XRD), field emission electron microscopy (FE-SEM) and energy-dispersive X-ray (EDX) confirmed that the fabricated Cu-IONPs sample is composed of Cu2+ doped magnetite phase with particles with average size of 20 nm. Magnetic studies by VSM showed that the deposited Cu-IONPs provide proper super-paramagnetic characters of saturation magnetization(Ms=54.47 emu g-1), remanent magnetization (Mr) (Mr=0.41 emu g-1) and coercivity (HCi=10.53 G). The obtained electrochemical data indicated that Cu-IONPs are enable to exhibit specific capacitance as high as 189.6 F g-1 at a discharging current of 2 A g-1, and 88.8% capacity retention after 2000 GCD cycling. Based on the obtained results, our developed electrosynthesis method is proposed as a facile route for the synthesis of high performance Cu-IONPs.