Solution combustion synthesis (SCS) is a worldwide adopted technique to synthesize nanomaterials, especially for oxides, because of its simplicity, energy and time-effectiveness, and low cost. The general difficulty encountered in SCS is the controllability over phases and morphologies of the products, which arises from the inherent rapid and uncontrollable combustion procedure. In this regard, the present work is devoted to review the recent progress on phase- and morphology-controlled SCS in detail. Besides the various metal oxides, SCS is now applicable to fabricate nanomaterials of metal phosphates, metal silicates, metal borates, metal sulfides, metals, and even alloys, through careful selection of solution compositions. Oxides with regular morphologies of flowers, belts, triangles, tubes, wires, and rods can be synthesized by SCS, in the presence of certain templates, or through a self-assembly procedure. The recent progress made on the synthesis of porous materials via SCS is summarized. SCS is also capable of growing metal oxide thin films at low temperatures, enabling the fabrication of low-cost and high-performance electronics on flexible plastic substrates.

Carbon cloth textiles are widely used in high-performance flexible, portable and low-cost supercapacitors. Herein, a simple calcination in air at 450 °C was developed to activate commercial carbon cloth textiles to achieve a significantly improved specific surface area and in turn outstanding electrochemical performances for supercapacitors. The areal capacitance of the activated carbon cloth (ACC) electrode is 1184 times that of the untreated one (1136.7 vs. 0.96 mF cm⁻² at 2 mV s⁻¹), mainly due to the introduced surface oxygen functional groups, the remarkably improved specific surface area, and the greatly enhanced hydrophobicity. The full-cell symmetric supercapacitor constructed with ACC shows an areal specific capacitance of 554 mF cm⁻² and an energy density of 77 μW h cm⁻² at 1 mA cm⁻² with a superior rate capability (retaining 70 μW h cm⁻² at 50 mA cm⁻²) and a good cycling stability of up to 50 000 cycles. Furthermore, ACC can serve as an excellent scaffold for supporting other capacitive materials (e.g., TiO₂ nanowires) to further improve the areal capacitance. The current investigation provides an extremely simple route to significantly improve the electrochemical performances of ACC-based electrodes for supercapacitors. It also evidences the significant contributions of carbon cloth to specific capacitance when it is used as a substrate to load electrochemically active materials and at the same time the synthetic route involves air calcination at a temperature above 450 °C.