Fabrication and Seamless Integration of Insensitive-Bending Fully Printed All-in-One Fabric-Based Supercapacitors Based on Cost-Effective MWCNT Electrodes.

Abstract

All-in-one supercapacitors are considered to be promising due to their advantages of flexibility and structure stability. However, the sophisticated and precise manufacturing processes and difficulty of series/parallel integration hinder their application and development. Herein, cost-effective all-in-one fabric-based supercapacitors (all-in-one FSCs) are fabricated by utilizing the facile screen-printing technique and multiwalled carbon nanotube (MWCNT) electrodes. The MWCNT electrodes are constructed on the gel-electrolyte-soaked fabric that simultaneously serves as separator and electrode substrates. The as-prepared all-in-one FSC exhibits better capacitive behavior and rate capability and lower internal resistance than traditional sandwiched fabric-based supercapacitors (sandwiched FSCs). Moreover, due to the simplified structure and interface interaction, the all-in-one FSC shows excellent flexibility and stability even under dynamic bending cycles with a relatively high strain rate of 20% s-1. This work also demonstrates the seamless series/parallel integration scheme of all-in-one supercapacitors by designing the screen-printing patterns instead of using metal wires. The proposed fabrication process and series/parallel integration scheme definitely improve the portability of integrated supercapacitors and potentially contribute to the large-scale production and application on wearable electronics.