MXene-coated silk-derived carbon cloth toward flexible electrode for supercapacitor application

Abstract

Flexible supercapacitors are promising energy storage devices in wearable smart electronics. Exploring cost-efficient electrodes with high capacitance would promote the wide-scale application of such capacitors. Herein, in order to explore a methodology for preparing low cost, flexible, tough, and up-scalable supercapacitor electrodes, silk textile is directly carbonized to make a conductive free-standing textile substrate. Through mildly baking the surfactant-free Ti3C2Tx flakes suspension loaded on the carbonized silk cloth, a uniform and adhesive coating consisting of nanometer-thick Ti3C2Tx flakes is well established on the conductive fabric support, forming a MXene-coated flexible textile electrode. The fabricated electrode exhibits a high areal capacitance of 362 mF/cm2 with excellent cyclability and flexibility. Moreover, capacitance changes neglegibly under the bending deformation mode. This study elucidates the feasibility of using silk-derived carbon cloth from biomss for MXene-based flexible supercapacitor.