Scalable, All‐Printed Photocapacitor Fibers and Modules based on Metal‐Embedded Flexible Transparent Conductive Electrodes for Self‐Charging Wearable Applications

Abstract

of a lightweight, flexible, self-charging device with stable and sustainable power output. To tackle this issue, researchers are committed to assembling a flexible, uninterruptible, self-charging system by integrating various flexible energy-harvesting and energy-storage devices, giving rise to novel photocapacitor-integrated devices. Individually, the device application of flexible, fabric/stripe-type photovoltaic (PV) cells and supercapacitors in futuristic textile circuits has been extensively explored. These fiber/stripe-based devices can be easily integrated and woven together into garments with orderly patterns, such as stripes or mosaics, without compromising the wearing comfort and aesthetic design of the garment itself. [5-7] For flexible energy-harvesting devices, researchers have developed highly efficient and flexible PV cells, such as dyesensitized, [5] organic, [8] and perovskite [9] solar cells, which are environmentally benign. Compared to dye-sensitized and perovskite solar cells, organic solar cells (OSCs) exhibit superior device flexibility and higher power conversion efficiency (PCE) retention under extreme mechanical deformation/ distortion. They have these benefits because they are based on organic polymers, which are non-brittle in nature. Additionally, OSCs are low-cost, printable, reproducible, and lightweight, rendering them compatible with futuristic wearable textile applications. [1,3,5,10-13] However, conventional film-based OSCs exhibit flexibility only in a direction perpendicular to the film and are not compatible with the weaving process for wearable electronic applications. By virtue of their diverse fabrication techniques and structural designs, the dimensions of flexible OSC devices can be tuned from 2D (film) to 1D (fibers/stripes) by further scaling down the y-axis of the conventional film-based device. 1D fiber/ stripe-shaped devices that are fully compatible with the weaving process can then be obtained. Stripe-shaped OSCs have inherent advantages over planar OSCs, such as incredibly high mechanical flexibility, which means they can conform to arbitrary shapes like the human body. [14] Furthermore, after the weaving process, the relative shadowed active area is less for stripe-shaped device structures as compared with fiber-shaped geometries. On another note, flexible supercapacitors (F-SCs) have been used as energy storage systems in futuristic smart electronics The popularity of wearable smart electronic gadgets, such as smartphones, smartwatches, and medical sensors, is inhibited by their limited operation lifetime due to the lack of a sustainable self-charging power supply. This constraint can be overcome by developing a flexible, self-charging photocapacitor that can synchronously harvest and store energy. Here, ultrathin, all-printed, and metal-embedded transparent conducting electrodes (ME-TCEs) are designed for the fabrication of large-area, flexible organic solar cells (F-OSCs) and flexible supercapacitors (F-SCs). Stripe-shaped F-OSCs (SF-OSCs) and F-SCs (SF-SCs) ...

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Performance Enhancement of Organic Solar Cells by Adding a Liquid Crystalline Molecule in Cathode and Anode Interlayers

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