Chemical vapor deposition-based synthesis of cost-effective binder-free nanostructured Ag/MoS₂/Ni–F electrode material for portable energy storage devices

The synthesis of novel electrode materials (E-Ms) is the demand of scientific community to overcome the energy crisis in developing countries. Hereon, the molybdenum disulfide (MoS₂) and silver-wrapped MoS₂ (Ag/MoS₂) E-Ms are synthesized on hierarchical-nickel foam (Ni–F) via a cost-effective chemical vapor deposition technique. The synthesized E-Ms are characterized in terms of structure, chemical bonding, surface morphology, weight percentage of elements, porosity and energy storage capability. The X-ray diffraction analysis is indicated that by wrapping of Ag species, the diffraction peaks associated with MoS₂ material not only moved to higher Bragg's angles but their peaks intensities are also lowered which showed the existence of structural defects in the synthesized E-Ms. The surface area of cauliflower like Ag/MoS₂/Ni–F E-Ms (170 m²g^-1) is higher than the surface area (60 m²g^-1) of MoS₂/Ni–F E-Ms. The cauliflowers based Ag/MoS₂/Ni–F E-Ms is presented supreme specific capacitance of 4200 Fg^-1 as compared to MoS₂/Ni–F E-Ms (2518 Fg^-1) at 1Ag^-1. The implementation of power law and Dunn's model is demonstrated that the synthesized E-Ms can behave like a battery and supercapacitor (0.67 < b < 0.92) nature. The diffusive-controlled contribution for cauliflower-based synthesized E-Ms is 97 % at 5 mVs⁻¹ and became 88 % at 70 mVs⁻¹. The assembled asymmetric supercapacitor (ASC) device is exhibited the specific capacitance of 957 Fg^-1, energy density of 366–284 Whkg⁻¹ and power density of 1494–14110 Wkg^-1. The ASC device could sustain the capacitance retention of 94 %, Coulombic efficiency of 99 % even for 20000 cycles in contrast to capacitance retention of 95 % and Coulombic efficiency of 97.89 % of the synthesized E-Ms.