One-dimensional flexible supercapacitor yarns are of considerable interest for future wearable electronics. The bottleneck in this field is how to develop devices of high energy and power density, by using economically viable materials and scalable fabrication technologies. Here we report a hierarchical graphene–metallic textile composite electrode concept to address this challenge. The hierarchical composite electrodes consist of low-cost graphene sheets immobilized on the surface of Ni-coated cotton yarns, which are fabricated by highly scalable electroless deposition of Ni and electrochemical deposition of graphene on commercial cotton yarns. Remarkably, the volumetric energy density and power density of the all solid-state supercapacitor yarn made of one pair of these composite electrodes are 6.1 mWh cm−3 and 1,400 mW cm−3, respectively. In addition, this SC yarn is lightweight, highly flexible, strong, durable in life cycle and bending fatigue tests, and integratable into various wearable electronic devices.
Hydrogel electrolyte is widely used in solid energy storage devices because of its high ionic conductivity, environmental friendliness, and non‐leakage property. However, hydrogel electrolyte is not resistant to freezing. Here, a high proton conductive zwitterionic hydrogel electrolyte with super conductivity of 1.51 mS cm–1 at −50 °C is fabricated by random copolymerization of acrylamide and zwitterionic monomer in the presence of 1 m H2SO4 and ethylene glycol (EG). The antifreezing performance and low temperature conductivity are ascribed to hydrogen bonds and ionic bonds between the components and water molecules in the system and can be tuned by changing the monomer ratio and EG contents. The proton hopping migration on the ionic group of the polymer chains and Grotthuss proton transport mechanism are responsible for the high proton conductivity while Grotthuss transport is dominated at the glassy state of the polymer chains. The electrolyte‐assembled supercapacitor (SC) offers high specific capacitance of 93.5 F g–1 at 25 °C and 62.0 F g–1 at −50 °C with a capacitance retention of 91.1% and 81.5% after 10 000 cycles, respectively. The SC can even work at −70 °C. The electrolyte outperforms most reported antifreezing hydrogel electrolytes and has high potential in low‐temperature devices.
3 November 2016 in ACS Applied Materials & Interfaces