Preparation and characterization of porous hollow sphere of Ni doped CuS nanostructures for electrochemical supercapacitor electrode material

Abstract

Porous metal sulfide nanostructures are promising materials for developing high performance electrochemical devices. Herein, Porous hollow nano structures of Ni doped CuS were successfully synthesized by hydrothermal method with surfactant (CTAB) as stabilizer and ethylene glycol as solvent. Prepared samples were systematically characterized by X-ray diffraction, UV-Vis spectrom-etry, Fourier transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), SEM/EDS, Thermal analysis (TG/DTA) and Atomic force microscopy (AFM). The size of Ni doped CuS mor-phologies was about 5–10 nm corresponding to the Ni doping concentrations of 0.05, 0.1–0.6 mM respectively. The characterization revealed the presence of CuS (Covellite). The supercapacitor performance of this nanostructure was characterized by cyclic voltammetry in 2 M KOH as electrolyte. The porous hollow nano Ni doped CuS exhibit higher specific capacitance (400 Fg−1 at 5 mV/s), which was higher than that of common CuS nano structures (287 Fg−1 at 5 mV/s). The enhanced performance is mainly due to the pore in the Ni doped CuS nanostructures.