Hybrid ternary rice paper/polypyrrole ink/pen ink nanocomposites as components of flexible supercapacitors

Abstract

The rapid development of the portable and wearable devices has inspired the ever-growing pursuit of flexible energy storage equipment which can power these devices. Here, rice paper (RP) was integrated with a homemade LGS-polypyrrole (LGS-PPy) ink and commercial pen ink in order to construct a flexible electrode of a supercapacitor via a facial dip-coating method. The obtained RP/LGS-PPy ink/Pen ink composites showed a high areal specific capacitance of 1568 mF/cm2 at 0.2 mA/cm2, owing to the uniform deposition of a LGS-PPy layer which was covered by the pen ink coating. Furthermore, the assembled symmetric supercapacitor fabricated from the RP/LGS-PPy ink/Pen ink electrode exhibited impressive electrochemical performances in terms of specific capacitance (317.5 mF/cm2 at 2 mA/cm2), power density (846 μW/cm2 at the energy density of 23.5 μWh/cm2), and life times (82.1% capacitance retention after 5000 cycles). In addition, the capacitance of the as-prepared device remained essentially unchanged even after bending at 180°, thus demonstrating this device's outstanding flexibility. The low cost of raw materials, robust fabrication strategy as well as the moderate performances make the RP-based supercapacitor a promising candidate for future flexible energy storage devices.