Development of conducting polymer based wearable supercapacitors

The advent of self-powered functional smart garments has given rise to a demand for wearable energy storage devices since traditional energy storage devices are too bulky, rigid and heavy to be seamlessly integrated into textile structures. Supercapacitors which can be fabricated using non-toxic electrode materials and non-flammable electrolyte have been of interest for smart garments. Smart garments should operate well under mechanical deformation, such as bending, twisting, and even stretching. Wearable supercapacitors are expected to maintain high performance under such conditions. Carbon based supercapacitors show high power but low specific capacitance due to the non-Faradaic charge storage mechanism. Metal oxides/hydroxides possess high pseudo-capacitance. However, their conductivity is not ideal. Conducting polymers have drawn great attention for wearable supercapacitor application, due to their high redox capacitance, high conductivity, low cost, ease of fabrication, and most importantly, inherent highly flexible nature. Polypyrrole (PPy) has been extensively developed for flexible electrodes because of its outstanding flexibility and high conductivity. It is chosen as the target active material to fabricate wearable supercapacitors in this thesis.