There
have been extensive demands for eco-friendly, lightweight,
flexible, and high performance supercapacitors for advanced applications
like wearable electronics, hybrid electric vehicles, and industrial
grid storage. In this work, a metalless nanocellulose-based PANI/RGO
electrode with excellent flexibility, mechanical strength, and conductivity
was developed and assembled into sandwich-like supercapacitors. Reduced
graphene oxide (RGO) was mixed into aniline during the in
situ polymerization of PANI to improve conductivity of the
composite electrode. This eco-friendly metalless nanocellulose based
electrode was fabricated via filtrations driven by a vacuum and assembled
into sandwich structures. The ratios between nanocellulose, PANI,
and RGO were optimized to achieve both high electrochemical performance
and good mechanical properties. The composite electrode has a large
active materials mass loading ratio of 16.5 mg/cm2, and
the assembled supercapacitor gives small impedance at 3.90 Ω,
suggesting an excellent conductivity. This work shows the great potential
of developed flexible and lightweight nanocellulose composites in
the fabrication of supercapacitors that can be used in a variety of
biomedical applications including e-skins.
Flexible and
self-healable supercapacitors (SCs) show great potential in developing
smart energy storage devices for health care electronics, which call
for the development of nontoxic, biocompatible, and biodegradable
electronics based on natural materials. Most self-healable mechanisms
need external stimuli and a long healing time, which limits their
practical applications. Herein, we developed a mussel-inspired biocompatible
SCs with autonomously self-healing capability through a hybrid system
of gelatin methacrylate (GelMA), cellulose nanocrystal (CNC), and
tannic acid (TA). Mussel-inspired TA on GelMA-CNC hydrogels were optimized
by concentrations and timings to evaluate stress, Young’s modulus,
toughness, and compressive tests for further developing electrochemical
performance on the hydrogel electrode with polyaniline (PANI) and
reduced graphene oxide (RGO). This SC shows an impedance of 5.67 and
6.38 Ω after one healing processing. The specific capacitance,
energy density, and power density of the SCs reached 1861.21 mF cm–3, 20.65 mW cm–3, and 595.59 mWh
cm–3, and retained 96%, 100%, and 82%, respectively,
of their original values after one cut-healing process. This study
demonstrates remarkable potential in advanced smart and biocompatible
energy storage devices.
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