Editorial pubs.acs.org/cm
Early in the Game: Graphene/Polyaniline Nanocomposites for Supercapacitors Wu, Zhao, Zhang, and Zhang: New Members of the Chemistry of Materials’ 1k Club
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carefully designed reduction and reoxidation steps. The homogeneity of the resulting PANI nanofiber/graphene nanocomposites results in excellent electrical performance as a supercapacitor. We (Chemistry of Materials, CM) interviewed Prof. Wu (JW) to find out more about the paper at the time of writing. CM: At what stages of your academic careers were you, the authors, when this article was submitted to Chemistry of Materials? JW: I was a third year assistant professor at the National University of Singapore (NUS). The first author Dr. Kai Zhang was a postdoc in my group, and he later moved to GE in Singapore and now is in Ecolab in Singapore. The cocorresponding author, Professor George (X. S.) Zhao, is now a professor at Queensland University, Australia. The collaborator, Dr. Li Li Zhang, went to the United States to pursue a postdoc position after her Ph.D. work at NUS. CM: Given the high citation record of this article, a significant amount of research has been impacted by your findings over the past 7 years. Where did you think the field was headed when you wrote the article? In your opinion, how has this particular research field evolved ever since? JW: Frankly, I never expected that this article would receive so much interest and such a high number of citations. My expertise was actually synthetic chemistry of π-conjugated systems (in particular, graphene-like molecules) and supramolecular chemistry. We started this project at that time because supercapacitors were becoming an important technology for future energy storage devices and I came up with the idea that a combination of graphitic carbon (e.g., graphene) and conducting polymers could solve the problems of stability and capacity that existed in common capacitors. At that time, studies on graphene had became popular. Given my background on graphene-like molecules, I wrote a proposal to use graphene/conducting polymer composites for supercapacitor applications to A*STAR, and fortunately, I got it! This is the first paper on supercapacitors from my group. This is a work initiated by synthetic chemists, and by using our knowledge on graphene oxide chemistry and conducting polymers, we successfully synthesized homogeneous graphene/polyaniline composites, which fortunately demonstrated quite good performance. Professor George Zhao and his student Li Li Zhang were experts on supercapacitors, and they helped us on the supercapacitor characterization, as we did not have any experience on supercapacitors. I am glad to see that, after our publications, many researchers working on capacitors joined the area, leading to a lot of work toward the development of various graphene-based composite materials for supercapacitors. It is also a pity that, after completion of the three-year project, I
s part of our ongoing series of interviews with authors of papers published in Chemistry of Materials that have been cited 1000 times or more, we caught up with Prof. Jishan Wu of the National University of Singapore (NUS) who, with Prof. George (X. S.) Zhao, co-authored a highly cited paper entitled “Graphene/Polyaniline Nanofiber Composites as Supercapacitor Electrodes” (Figure 1).1 This paper has been cited 1085
Figure 1. (a) Prof. Jishan Wu, (b) Prof. George Zhao, and (c) Figure 1 from ref 1, showing the method to prepare polyaniline/GO nanocomposites.
times in Web of Science and 1349 times in Google Scholar.2 Although published 7 years ago in 2010, this paper can still be found in the top 20 most highly downloaded list (“Most Read”) at Chemistry of Materials for the past year.3 This work describes a very clever approach to synthesizing uniform nanocomposites of graphene and polyaniline (PANI) nanofibers, via in situ polymerization of aniline with graphene oxide, followed by © 2017 American Chemical Society
Published: June 13, 2017 4607
DOI: 10.1021/acs.chemmater.7b01701 Chem. Mater. 2017, 29, 4607−4608
Chemistry of Materials
Editorial
moved back to my focus research on open-shell diradicaloids and polyradicaloids, and I have no clear idea on how this research area evolved now. CM: If you had to put your finger on it, what made your paper special? What are you most happy about when you reread this article? JW: After rereading this paper 7 years later, I am happy to see that we, as synthetic chemists, nicely solved the aggregation problem of reduced graphene oxide and the cycling stability problem of conducting polyanilines by an elegant chemical design. It was one of the first papers examining graphene/ conducting polymer composites for energy storage. CM: What is your advice to young scientists trying to discover the next breakthrough in material science? JW: We need “out-of-box” thinking. We should not need to constrain our thinking only to our own area of expertise. Do something with which you are not familiar, and you may generate something really new and interesting for scientists in another box!
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Carlos Toro, Managing Editor Jillian M. Buriak, Editor-in-Chief AUTHOR INFORMATION
ORCID
Jillian M. Buriak: 0000-0002-9567-4328 Notes
Views expressed in this editorial are those of the authors and not necessarily the views of the ACS.
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REFERENCES
(1) Zhang, K.; Zhang, L. L.; Zhao, X. S.; Wu, J. Graphene/Polyaniline Nanofiber Composites as Supercapacitor Electrodes. Chem. Mater. 2010, 22, 1392−1401. (2) As of April 18, 2017. (3) http://pubs.acs.org/action/showMostReadArticles?topArticles Type=recent&journalCode=cmatex.
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DOI: 10.1021/acs.chemmater.7b01701 Chem. Mater. 2017, 29, 4607−4608
