High Areal Capacitance of Flexible Supercapacitors Fabricated with Carbon Cloth-Carbon Fiber-TiO2 Electrodes and Different Hydrogel Polymer Electrolytes

Abstract

Developing suitable electrode material and electrolyte is critical for fabricating a flexible supercapacitor with large areal capacitance. Furthermore, the compatibility between electrode material and electrolyte is essential. Herein, a carbon cloth-carbon fiber-TiO2 (CC–CF–TiO2) based flexible electrode is designed and developed for the first time and tested electrochemically in various electrolytes. More importantly, the electrochemical studies performed in both half-cell and full-cell studies are discussed. The highest areal capacitance of 270 mF cm−2 is realized for CC–CF–TiO2 flexible electrode in 1 M H2SO4 aqueous electrolyte at 10 mA cm−2 current density. Full-cell flexible supercapacitor fabricated with hydrogel polymer electrolyte demonstrates the maximum energy density and power density as 4.56 μWh cm−2 and 418.48 μW cm−2 respectively. The attained values are highly encouraging in comparison to the old reports. The results obtained in this work demonstrate the potential of our fabricated flexible supercapacitor for next-generation wearable energy storage applications.