Abstract
A printed energy harvesting and storage circuit powered by ambient office lighting and its use to power a printed display is reported. The autonomous device is composed of three printed electronic components: an organic photovoltaic module, a carbon-nanotubes-only supercapacitor and an electrochromic display element. Components are fabricated from safe and environmentally friendly materials, and have been fabricated using solution processing methods, which translate into low-cost and high-throughput manufacturing. A supercapacitor made of spray-coated carbon nanotube based ink and aqueous NaCl electrolyte was charged using a printed organic photovoltaic module exposed to office lighting conditions. The supercapacitor charging rate, self-discharge rate and display operation were studied in detail. The supercapacitor self-discharge rate was found to depend on the charging rate. The fully charged supercapacitor was used as a power source to run the electrochromic display over 50 times.
Highlights
Supercapacitors (SC), known as ultracapacitors and electric double-layer capacitors (EDLC), are electrochemical energy storage devices which have higher cycle life and higher power output than batteries[11,12,13]
We focus on SC performance in an energy-autonomous circuit with a printed organic photovoltaic (OPV) module and a printed electrochromic display (ECD) element
CNT electrodes for SC were prepared from a CNT/xylan nanocomposite ink, which works simultaneously as a high surface area active electrode material and electrically conducting current collector material
Summary
Supercapacitors (SC), known as ultracapacitors and electric double-layer capacitors (EDLC), are electrochemical energy storage devices which have higher cycle life and higher power output than batteries[11,12,13]. Authors have studied SC fabrication using CNT based nanocomposite ink[25,26,27] and graphene/conducting polymer composite[28] as active electrode materials as well as the use of nanocellulose as separator[27,29]. The authors have recently demonstrated printed energy harvesting circuits gathering energy from an electromagnetic field using a printed radio frequency (RF) antenna[23] and from movement using a piezoelectric sensor[24], and used solution processed SCs as the energy storage devices. The authors have used similar OPV and ECD components to demonstrate functionality of SC made of electrodeposited graphene/ conducting polymer composite, printed graphine ink and metallic current collector[28], but not studied the SC behaviour in detail. The charging of the SC with the OPV module under typical indoor lighting conditions, the SC self-discharging and the SC voltage evolution during the ECD operation have been investigated
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