High energy flexible supercapacitors formed via bottom-up infilling of gel electrolytes into thick porous electrodes.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 29968704.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1038/s41467-018-04937-8 and PMC identifier 6030180.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Formation of thick, high energy density, flexible solid supercapacitors is challenging because of difficulties infilling gel electrolytes into porous electrodes. Incomplete infilling results in a low capacitance and poor mechanical properties. Here we report a bottom-up infilling method to overcome these challenges. Electrodes up to 500 μm thick, formed from multi-walled carbon nanotubes and a composite of poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene), polystyrene sulfonate and multi-walled carbon nanotubes are successfully infilled with a polyvinyl alcohol/phosphoric acid gel electrolyte. The exceptional mechanical properties of the multi-walled carbon nanotube-based electrode enable it to be rolled into a radius of curvature as small as 0.5 mm without cracking and retain 95% of its initial capacitance after 5000 bending cycles. The areal capacitance of our 500 μm thick poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene), polystyrene sulfonate, multi-walled carbon nanotube-based flexible solid supercapacitor is 2662 mF cm<sup>-2</sup> at 2 mV s<sup>-1</sup>, at least five times greater than current flexible supercapacitors.