title: High-performance, stretchable, wire-shaped supercapacitors.
abstract: A general approach toward extremely stretchable and highly conductive electrodes was developed. The method involves wrapping a continuous carbon nanotube (CNT) thin film around pre-stretched elastic wires, from which high-performance, stretchable wire-shaped supercapacitors were fabricated. The supercapacitors were made by twisting two such CNT-wrapped elastic wires, pre-coated with poly(vinyl alcohol)/H3PO4 hydrogel, as the electrolyte and separator. The resultant wire-shaped supercapacitors exhibited an extremely high elasticity of up to 350% strain with a high device capacitance up to 30.7 F g(-1), which is two times that of the state-of-the-art stretchable supercapacitor under only 100% strain. The wire-shaped structure facilitated the integration of multiple supercapacitors into a single wire device to meet specific energy and power needs for various potential applications. These supercapacitors can be repeatedly stretched from 0 to 200% strain for hundreds of cycles with no change in performance, thus outperforming all the reported state-of-the-art stretchable electronics.
authors.affiliation: Center of Advanced Science and Engineering for Carbon (Case4Carbon), Department of Macromolecular Science and Engineering, Case Western Reserve University, 10900 Euclid Avenue, Cleveland, OH 44106 (USA).
authors.forename: Tao
authors.initials: T
authors.lastname: Chen
authors.forename: Rui
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Hao
authors.forename: Huisheng
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Peng
authors.forename: Liming
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Dai
mesh_terms: D025802:Electric Capacitance; D004581:Electronics; D004867:Equipment Design; D008855:Microscopy, Electron, Scanning
keywords: conductive materials; nanotubes; polymers; scanning probe microscopy; wires