A self-healable and highly stretchable supercapacitor based on a dual crosslinked polyelectrolyte.

Yan Huang,Qi Xue,Yang Huang,Zifeng Wang,Zengxia Pei,Ming Zhong,Xuming Xie,Minshen Zhu,Chunyi Zhi

doi:10.1038/ncomms10310

Abstract

Superior self-healability and stretchability are critical elements for the practical wide-scale adoption of personalized electronics such as portable and wearable energy storage devices. However, the low healing efficiency of self-healable supercapacitors and the small strain of stretchable supercapacitors are fundamentally limited by conventional polyvinyl alcohol-based acidic electrolytes, which are intrinsically neither self-healable nor highly stretchable. Here we report an electrolyte comprising polyacrylic acid dual crosslinked by hydrogen bonding and vinyl hybrid silica nanoparticles, which displays all superior functions and provides a solution to the intrinsic self-healability and high stretchability problems of a supercapacitor. Supercapacitors with this electrolyte are non-autonomic self-healable, retaining the capacitance completely even after 20 cycles of breaking/healing. These supercapacitors are stretched up to 600% strain with enhanced performance using a designed facile electrode fabrication procedure.

Highlights

Superior self-healability and stretchability are critical elements for the practical wide-scale adoption of personalized electronics such as portable and wearable energy storage devices
Most achieved strains did not exceed 100% and the performance usually deteriorated at super-high strains[29]. All these limitations of self-healable and stretchable supercapacitors are fundamentally attributed to the fact that the widely used polyvinyl alcohol (PVA)-based acidic electrolytes are neither healable nor very stretchable, giving rise to disadvantages of unsatisfactory performance, additional components and complex multi-step designs
A new electrolyte is developed comprising polyacrylic acid dual crosslinked by hydrogen bonding and vinyl hybrid silica nanoparticles (VSNPs-PAA)

Summary

Introduction

Superior self-healability and stretchability are critical elements for the practical wide-scale adoption of personalized electronics such as portable and wearable energy storage devices. We report an electrolyte comprising polyacrylic acid dual crosslinked by hydrogen bonding and vinyl hybrid silica nanoparticles, which displays all superior functions and provides a solution to the intrinsic self-healability and high stretchability problems of a supercapacitor Supercapacitors with this electrolyte are non-autonomic self-healable, retaining the capacitance completely even after 20 cycles of breaking/healing. Supercapacitors are facilely assembled by the use of this polyelectrolyte and polypyrrole (PPy)-deposited carbon nanotube (CNT) paper electrodes with the incorporation of small CNT patches on the cutting wounds and a pre-stretched wavy structure They exhibit the merits of self-healability (B100% efficiency during all 20 breaking/healing cycles), stretchability (600% strain with enhanced performance), the fewest number of components and facile fabrication

Methods

Results

Conclusion