In-situ deposition of reduced graphene oxide layers on textile surfaces by the reactive inkjet printing technique and their use in supercapacitor applications

Abstract

In this work, a reactive inkjet printing (RIP) has been proposed as an useful method for the deposition of reduced graphene oxide (RGO) layers on different textile fabrics - polyacrylonitrile, poly(ethylene terephthalate), and polypropylene. Under the RIP process, the RGO layers were grown on fabrics by printing of graphene oxide (GO) suspension and simultaneously reduced by L-ascorbic acid. This strategy is a simple and one step process to grow conductive layers of RGO on textile substrates at large scale without any post treatment and does not require any corrosive reagent during the process. Thus, obtained binder-free RGO on textile fabrics can be readily used directly as an electrode material. The applicability of the selected textile fabrics modified by RIP deposition of RGO for energy storage application was tested. For this, a flexible all-solid-state supercapacitor was constructed using two RGO coated textile fabrics as electrodes separated by gel electrolyte (poly(vinyl alcohol)/H3PO4 electrolyte). The as-obtained supercapacitor exhibited an area specific capacitance of 13.3 m F/cm2 (79.9 F/g) at a current density of 0.1 mA/cm2, and delivered an energy density of 1.18 mW h/cm2 and the power density of 4.6 mW/cm2.