Compact Assembly and Programmable Integration of Supercapacitors.

Lu, Bing; Liu, Feng; Sun, Guoqiang; Gao, Jian; Xu, Tong; Xiao, Yukun; Shao, Changxiang; Jin, Xuting et al. · Adv Mater · 2020

basic_science · Level V

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Abstract

Microsized supercapacitors (mSCs) with small volume, rapid charge-discharge rate, and ultralong cyclic lifetime are urgently needed to meet the demand of miniaturized portable electronic devices. A versatile self-shrinkage assembling (SSA) strategy to directly construct the compact mSCs (CmSCs) from hydrogels of reduced graphene oxide is reported. A single CmSC is only 0.0023 cm<sup>3</sup> in volume, which is significantly smaller than most reported mSCs in fiber/yarn and planar interdigital forms. It exhibits a high capacitance of up to 68.3 F cm<sup>-3</sup> and a superior cycling stability with 98% capacitance retention after 25 000 cycles. Most importantly, the SSA technique enables the CmSC as the building block to realize arbitrary, programmable, and multi-dimensional integration for adaptable and complicated power systems. By design on mortise and tenon joint connection, autologous integrated 3D interdigital CmSCs are fabricated in a self-holding-on manner, which thus dramatically reduces the whole device volume to achieve the high-performance capacitive behavior. Consequently, the SSA technique offers a universal and versatile approach for large-scale on-demand integration of mSCs as flexible and transformable power sources.