Facile Fabrication of Flexible Supercapacitors for Wearable Applications

The need to develop next-generation wearable electronics in various fields has promoted the development of flexible and lightweight supercapacitors with high performance. Great progress has been made in developing flexible electrode materials, seeking stable and efficient gel polymer electrolytes and investigating different device architectures. However, it is still a main challenge to develop flexible electrodes on a large-scale and in a cost-effective manner. In addition, supercapacitors with interdigitated electrodes exhibit superior performance (i.e. higher energy and power density) in a limited space than the traditional sandwiched design with film electrodes and are more suitable to be integrated to the increasingly miniaturized wearable electronics. Nevertheless, the additional electrode patterning step exerts pressure on developing simple and scalable patterning techniques and selecting technically compatible electrode materials. The main goal for this study is to develop high performance electrodes (in the form of both film and interdigitated patterns) for flexible supercapacitors in simple and scalable ways.