Highly stretchable, compressible and arbitrarily deformable all-hydrogel soft supercapacitors

By Juan Zeng, Liubing Dong, Wuxin Sha, Lu Wei, Xin Guo. 2020

198 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract Most developed flexible energy storage devices lack sufficient softness and toughness to tolerate various deformations, such as stretching, compressing, twisting, folding and puncturing, meanwhile guarantee a stable energy output required for the soft human-machine interfaces and intelligent wearable electronics. In this work, all-hydrogel soft supercapacitors consisting of reversibly deformable hydrogel electrodes and electrolyte are constructed without using additional stretchable substrate or separator membrane. Both electrode and electrolyte contain the same polyacrylamide/sodium alginate dual-network hydrogel matrix, making them possess superb self-adhesion due to hydrophilic interaction/hydrogen bonds, and highly softness/toughness thanks to the energy-dissipative mechanism. After adding carbon nanotube conductive network/electrode active material and electrolyte salt/redox couple in the hydrogel matrix, the newly developed supercapacitor with all-in-one architecture is intrinsically highly stretchable/compressible and can even be deformed arbitrarily under various severe stress-strain deformation conditions at device level, simultaneously deliver high areal capacitance (232 mF cm−2 at 5 mV s−1 and 128 mF cm−2 at 1 mA cm−2) and maintain stable energy output. The simple device architecture, novel structural components, steady mechanical properties combined with excellent electrochemical properties make the soft supercapacitors promising for truly wearable applications.

Subfields: Biomaterials, Biomedical Engineering, Electronic, Optical and Magnetic Materials

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0d21565460637764874ea3e0bb3d07b9d45300b7