Dendritic Heterojunction Nanowire Arrays for High-Performance Supercapacitors

Herein, we designed and synthesized for the first time a series of 3D dendritic heterojunction arrays on Ni foam substrates, with NiCo2S4 nanowires as cores and NiCo2O4, NiO, Co3O4, and MnO2 nanowires as branches, and studied systematically their electrochemical performance in comparison with their counterparts in core/shell structure. Attributed to the following reasons: (1) both core and branch are pseudocapacitively active materials, (2) the special dendritic structure with considerable inter-nanowire space enables easy access of electrolyte to the core and branch surfaces, and (3) the highly conductive NiCo2S4 nanowire cores provide "superhighways" for charge transition, NiCo2S4-cored dendritic heterojunction electrodes synergistically lead to ultrahigh specific capacitance, good rate capability, and excellent cycling life. These results of core/branch dentritic heterojunction arrays is universially superior to their core/shell conterparts, thus this is a significant improvement of overall electrochemical performance.