title: Highly deformation-tolerant carbon nanotube sponges as supercapacitor electrodes.
abstract: Developing flexible and deformable supercapacitor electrodes based on porous materials is of high interest in energy related fields. Here, we show that carbon nanotube sponges, consisting of highly porous conductive networks, can serve as compressible and deformation-tolerant supercapacitor electrodes in aqueous or organic electrolytes. In aqueous electrolytes, the sponges maintain a similar specific capacitance (>90% of the original value) under a predefined compressive strain of 50% (corresponding to a volume reduction of 50%), and retain more than 70% of the original capacitance under 80% strain while the volume normalized capacitance increases by 3-fold. The sponge electrode maintains a stable performance after 1000 large strain compression cycles. A coin-shaped cell assembled with these sponges shows excellent stability over 15,000 charging cycles with negligible degradation after 500 cycles. Our results indicate that carbon nanotube sponges have the potential to fabricate deformable supercapacitor electrodes with stable performance.
authors.affiliation: Department of Mechanical Engineering, Tsinghua University, Beijing 100084, PR China.
authors.forename: Peixu
authors.initials: P
authors.lastname: Li
authors.forename: Chuiyan
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Kong
authors.forename: Yuanyuan
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Shang
authors.forename: Enzheng
authors.initials: E
authors.lastname: Shi
authors.forename: Yuntao
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Yu
authors.forename: Weizhong
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Qian
authors.forename: Fei
authors.initials: F
authors.lastname: Wei
authors.forename: Jinquan
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Wei
authors.forename: Kunlin
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Wang
authors.forename: Hongwei
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Zhu
authors.forename: Anyuan
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Cao
authors.forename: Dehai
authors.initials: D
authors.lastname: Wu