An agriculture-inspired nanostrategy towards flexible and highly efficient hybrid supercapacitors using ubiquitous substrates

Abstract

The growing surge in demand for sustainable energy and wide reaching of dumping culture has collectively promoted researchers to develop waste-to-wealth concepts for eco-benign energy storage devices. By taking inspiration from agriculture cultivating strategy, the discarded cardboards (CBs) are favorably transferred into highly flexible, economically viable and prolific energy storage electrodes for high-performance hybrid supercapacitors (HSCs). Specifically, bilayered flower-like Cu1-xNix-O/Ni–P nanoarchitectures are rationally designed on CB paper by facile electroless plating and electrochemical conversion methods, respectively. With the virtue of high conductivity and synergistic effects of hierarchical architectures, the flower-like Cu1-xNix-O/Ni–P/CB paper exhibited superior redox chemistry along with high areal capacity of 331.1 μAh/cm2 and good cycling stability of 91.4% in alkaline electrolyte. Moreover, the CB-based HSC is fabricated using flower-like Cu1-xNix-O/Ni–P/CB paper as a positive electrode and porous carbon as a negative electrode, which shows excellent energy density of 0.28 mWh/cm2 (43.37 Wh/kg) and power density of 2.61 W/cm2 (2827.88 W/kg), respectively. Following, a self-charging renewable energy conversion/storage station is designed with flexible solar cell and CB-based HSCs to demonstrate its suitability for switching and proximity applications. It is believed that this work can open up a new avenue for the dynamic transformation of ubiquitous substrates into economically viable and effective electrodes for high-performance energy storage systems.