Designing high-performance supercapacitors with indirubin-derived dynamic conjugated microporous polymers

We develop and analyze the conjugated microporous polymers (CMPs), Py-BD and TPA-BD CMPs, incorporating indirubin-based units for enhanced energy storage applications. The Py-BD CMP exhibits a higher surface area up to 250 m2 g−1, superior thermal stability as evidenced by a higher decomposition temperature up to 434.6 °C in thermal gravimetric analysis (TGA). On the other hand, TPA-BD CMP displays a higher capacitance per unit mass of 916.5 F g−1 at 1 A g−1 compared to Py-BD CMP. We conduct electrochemical evaluations using a two-electrode coin cell system with TPA-BD CMP, which demonstrates high capacitance and stability of 232.50 F g−1 and 83% respectively after 5000 cycles. The TPA-BD CMP-based coin cell shows promising performance, highlighting its suitability as an advanced and active material for supercapacitors. Our findings contribute to the development of advanced energy storage performance through the unique features of indirubin derivatives in CMP architectures.