A knittable fiber shaped supercapacitor based on natural cotton thread for wearable electronics
Abstract At present, the topic of building high performance, miniaturized and mechanically flexible energy storage modules which can be directly integrated into textile based wearable electronics is a hotspot in the wearable technology field. In this paper, we reported a highly flexible fiber shaped electrode fabricated through a one step convenient hydrothermal process. The prepared graphene hydrogels/multi walled carbon nanotubes cotton thread derived from natural cotton thread is electrochemically active and mechanically strong. Fiber shaped supercapacitor based on the prepared fiber electrodes and polyvinyl alcohol H 3 PO 4 gel electrolyte exhibits good capacitive performance (97.73 mF cm 1 at scan rate of 2 mV s 1 long cycle life (95.51% capacitance retention after 8000 charge discharge cycles) and considerable stability (90.75% capacitance retention after 500 continuous bending cycles) Due to its good mechanical and electrochemical properties, the graphene hydrogels/multi walled carbon nanotubes cotton thread based all solid fiber shaped supercapacitor can be directly knitted into fabrics and maintain its original capacitive performance. Such a low cost textile thread based versatile energy storage device may hold great potential for future wearable electronics applications.