Flexible and lightweight energy storage systems have received tremendous interest recently due to their potential applications in wearable electronics, roll-up displays, and other devices. To manufacture such systems, flexible electrodes with desired mechanical and electrochemical properties are critical. Herein we present a novel method to fabricate conductive, highly flexible, and robust film supercapacitor electrodes based on graphene/MnO(2)/CNTs nanocomposites. The synergistic effects from graphene, CNTs, and MnO(2) deliver outstanding mechanical properties (tensile strength of 48 MPa) and superior electrochemical activity that were not achieved by any of these components alone. These flexible electrodes allow highly active material loading (71 wt % MnO(2)), areal density (8.80 mg/cm(2)), and high specific capacitance (372 F/g) with excellent rate capability for supercapacitors without the need of current collectors and binders. The film can also be wound around 0.5 mm diameter rods for fabricating full cells with high performance, showing significant potential in flexible energy storage devices.

Supercapacitors with both high energy and high power densities are critical for many practical applications. In this paper, we discuss the design and demonstrate the fabrication of flexible asymmetric supercapacitors based on nanocomposite electrodes of MnO(2), activated carbon, carbon nanotubes and graphene. The combined unique properties of each of these components enable highly flexible and mechanically strong films that can serve as electrodes directly without using any current collectors or binders. Using these flexible electrodes and a roll-up approach, asymmetric supercapacitors with 2 V working voltage were successfully fabricated. The fabricated device showed excellent rate capability, with 78% of the original capacitance retained when the scan rate was increased from 2 mV s(-1) to 500 mV s(-1). Owing to the unique composite structure, these supercapacitors were able to deliver high energy density (24 W h kg(-1)) under high power density (7.8 kW kg(-1)) conditions. These features could enable supercapacitor based energy storage systems to be very attractive for a variety of critical applications, such as the power sources in hybrid electric vehicles and the back-up powers for wind and solar energy, where both high energy density and high power density are required.

The introduction of Prussian blue (PB), an inexpensive pigment material, elegantly breaks the solubility limit of the [Fe(CN) 6 ] 4À/3À electrolyte, and substantially boosts the capacity via an off-electrode chemical reaction. In the reversible redoxtargeting reaction cycles, PB acts as the energy reservoir, while [Fe(CN) 6 ] 4À/3À plays a role in mediating the reactions between the electrode and storage tank. The volumetric capacity surpasses other reported [Fe(CN) 6 ] 4À/3À -based and most other organic aqueous redox flow batteries.

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Although zinc oxide (ZnO), a low-cost and naturally abundant material, has a high theoretical specific capacity of 987 mA h g for hosting lithium ions, its application as an anode material has been hindered by its rapid capacity fading, mainly due to a large volume change (around 228%) upon repeated charge-discharge cycles. Herein, using carbon black (CB) powder as a support, ZnO-carbon black (denoted as ZnO-CB) nanocomposites were successfully fabricated using the atomic layer deposition (ALD) method. This method was able to produce strong interfacial molecular bindings between ZnO nanoclusters and the carbon surface that provide stable and robust electrical contact during lithiation and delithiation processes, as well as ZnO nanoclusters rich in oxygen vacancies (OVs) for faster Li-ion transport. Overall, the nanocomposites were able to deliver a high discharge specific capacity of 2096 mA h g at 100 mA g and stable cyclic stability with a specific capacity of 1026 mA h g maintained after 500 cycles. The composites also have excellent rate capability, and a reversible capacity at a high 1080 mA h g at 2000 mA g. The facile but unique synthesis method demonstrated in this work for producing nanostructures rich in OVs and nanocomposites with strong coupling via interfacial molecular bindings could be extended to the synthesis of other oxide based anode materials and therefore could have general significance for developing high energy density lithium ion batteries.

Flexible lithium batteries with high energy density have recently received tremendous interest due to their potential applications in flexible electronic devices. Herein, we report a novel method to fabricate highly flexible and robust carbon nanotube–graphene/sulfur (CNTs–RGO/S) composite film as free-standing cathode for flexible Li/S batteries with increased capacity and significantly improved rate capability. The free-standing CNTs–RGO/S cathode was able to deliver a peak capacity of 911.5 mAh g–1 sulfur (∼483 mAh g–1 electrode) and maintain 771.8 mAh g–1 sulfur after 100 charge–discharge cycles at 0.2C, indicating a capacity retention of 84.7%, which were both higher than the cathodes assembled without CNTs. Even after 100 cycles, the cathode showed a high tensile strength of 62.3 MPa. More importantly, the rate capability was improved by introducing CNTs. The CNTs–RGO/S cathode exhibited impressive capacities of 613.1 mAh g–1 sulfur at 1C with a capacity recuperability of ∼94% as the current returned to 0.2C. These results demonstrate that the well-designed nanocomposites are of great potential as the cathode for flexible lithium sulfur (Li/S) batteries. Such improved electrochemical properties could be attributed to the unique coaxial architecture of the nanocomposite, in which the evenly dispersed CNTs enable electrodes with improved electrical conductivity and mechanical properties and better ability to avoid the aggregation and ensure the dispersive distribution of the sulfur species during the charge/discharge process.

In this communication, we introduce the concept of three dimensional (3D) battery electrodes to enhance the capacity per footprint area for lithium-sulfur battery. In such a battery, 3D electrode of sulfur embedded into porous graphene sponges (S-GS) was directly used as the cathode with large areal mass loading of sulfur (12 mg cm−2), approximately 6–12 times larger than that of most reports. The graphene sponges (GS) worked as a framework that can provide high electronic conductive network, abilities to absorb the polysulfides intermediate, and meanwhile mechanical support to accommodate the volume changes during charge and discharge. As a result, the S-GS electrode with 80 wt.% sulfur can deliver an extremely high areal specific capacitance of 6.0 mAh cm−2 of the 11th cycle, and maintain 4.2 mAh cm−2 after 300 charge−discharge cycles at a rate of 0.1C, representing an extremely low decay rate (0.08% per cycle after 300 cycles), which could be the highest areal specific capacity with comparable cycle stability among the rechargeable Li/S batteries reported ever.

The min-max problem, also known as the saddle point problem, is a class of optimization problems in which we minimize and maximize two subsets of variables simultaneously. This class of problems can be used to formulate a wide range of signal processing and communication (SPCOM) problems.Despite its popularity, existing theory for this class has been mainly developed for problems with certain special convex-concave structure. Therefore, it cannot be used to guide the algorithm design for many interesting problems in SPCOM, where some kind of non-convexity often arises.In this work, we consider a general block-wise one-sided non-convex min-max problem, in which the minimization problem consists of multiple blocks and is non-convex, while the maximization problem is (strongly) concave. We propose a class of simple algorithms named Hybrid Block Successive Approximation (HiBSA), which alternatingly performs gradient descent-type steps for the minimization blocks and one gradient ascent-type step for the maximization problem. A key element in the proposed algorithm is the introduction of certain properly designed regularization and penalty terms, which are used to stabilize the algorithm and ensure convergence. For the first time, we show that such simple alternating min-max algorithms converge to first-order stationary solutions, with quantifiable global rates. To validate the efficiency of the proposed algorithms, we conduct numerical tests on a number of information processing and wireless communication problems, including the robust learning problem, the non-convex min-utility maximization problems, and certain wireless jamming problem arising in interfering channels. * The first two authors contributed equally to this work, and the names are listed alphabetically. S. Lu, I. Tsaknakis and M. Hong are with the DRAFT Problem (1) is quite generic, and it arises in a wide range of signal processing and communication (SPCOM) applications. We list of few of these applications below. A. Motivating Examples in SPCOMDistributed non-convex optimization: Consider a network of K agents defined by a connected graph G = {V, E} with |V| = K, where each agent i can communicate with its neighbors. A generic problem formulation that captures many problems that appear in distributed machine learning and signal processing (e.g., [2]-[5]) can be formulated as follows: