Triaxial Carbon Nanotube/Conducting Polymer Wet-Spun Fibers Supercapacitors for Wearable Electronics

Abstract

The ubiquity of wearables, coupled with the increasing demand for power, presents a unique opportunity for nanostructured fiber-based mobile energy storage systems. When designing wearable electronic textiles, there is a need for mechanically flexible, low-cost and light-weight components. To meet this demand, we have developed an all-in-one fiber supercapacitor with a total thickness of less than 100 μm using a novel facile coaxial wet-spinning approach followed by a fiber wrapping step. The formed triaxial fiber nanostructure consisted of an inner poly(3,4-ethylenedioxythiophene) polystyrene sulfonate (PEDOT:PSS) core coated with an ionically conducting chitosan sheath, subsequently wrapped with a carbon nanotube (CNT) fiber. The resulting supercapacitor is highly flexible, delivers a maximum energy density 5.83 Wh kg−1 and an extremely high power of 1399 W kg−1 along with remarkable cyclic stability and specific capacitance. This asymmetric all-in-one fiber supercapacitor may pave the way to a future generation of wearable energy storage devices.