All-Printed In-Plane Supercapacitors by Sequential Additive Manufacturing Process

Abstract

Supercapacitors are attractive due to their high power density and durability relative to batteries. Printing technology has been rapidly emerging as manufacturing friendly, with a quick turn around and low-cost approach to produce a variety of devices. Herein, we show an end-to-end printing of supercapacitors including the substrate, current collector and active layers, and a gel polymer electrolyte, all simply printed. Two types of supercapacitors, electrochemical double-layer capacitor (EDLC) and pseudocapacitor (PC), were developed with activated carbon and graphene-Mn3O4 nanocomposite-based active layers, respectively. The all-printed supercapacitors show specific power and specific energy of 800.3 W/kg and 1.17 Wh/kg (at 0.5 A/g) for the EDLC and 1601 W/kg and 10.6 Wh/kg (at 1 A/g) for the PC. Extended durability tests reveal that the EDLC exhibits negligible performance deviation after 100 000 charge/discharge cycles while the PC shows less than 10% capacitance degradation after 25 000 cycles.

Printable Gel Polymer Electrolytes for Solid-State Printed Supercapacitors

“…The current collector and active layer have an interdigitated structure, enabling an in-plane and separator-free device. Morphological features are similar to the SEM and TEM images provided in our previous work [ 3 ]. Finally, the GPE inks were printed based on the four-step process to be explained in the next section.…”

“…The in-plane solid-state supercapacitors were fabricated by the sequential printing process based on the direct writing mechanism [ 3 ]. The devices are based on the pseudocapacitive mechanism using graphene-Mn 3 O 4 nanocomposite electrodes [ 15 , 16 ].…”

“…Among various manufacturing techniques, printing, i.e., additive manufacturing, has attracted attention recently to produce a wide range of devices. A printed supercapacitor is fabricated by sequential layer-by-layer deposition of functional components with in-plane interdigitated structures made by precise patterning [ 3 , 4 , 5 ]. Printing has the benefits of low material waste, minimal fabrication facility, easy structural customization and good substrate compatibility, among others [ 6 ].…”

Atmospheric Pressure Plasma Printing of Nanomaterials for IoT Applications

“…Printed and flexile electronics has been receiving much attention recently and emerging as an important research area to meet the anticipated demands of the Internet of Things (IoT). [1][2][3], memory [4][5][6][7], battery [8], supercapacitor [9,10], photovoltaics [11], energy scavengers [12,13], gas sensors [14][15][16], biosensors and lab-on-paper [17][18][19], heat therapy pad [20], UV sensors [21], pressure and other physical sensors [22,23], antennas [24,25], displays [26] and many others [27].…”

Characterization of Fe2O3/Graphene Composites Synthesized using an In Situ Reaction of Inexpensive Graphite Oxide and FeCl3

“…High‐performance energy storage devices have been extensively studied in the recent past for application in electric vehicles (EVs) [1–6] . To meet the increasing public demand for long driving range of EVs after single charging, it is highly imperative to develop high‐energy‐density lithium ion batteries (LIBs) as energy storage devices.…”