Sustainable Materials for Solid Flexible Supercapacitors

Solid, thin and flexible supercapacitors have been investigated leveraging sustainable and low-cost biomass-based carbon electrodes and a series of solid polymer electrolytes. The performance of these solid flexible devices was systematically compared to commercial activated carbon (AC) and liquid electrolyte baseline. Solid-state devices especially chitosan AC enabled supercapacitors were shown to closely resemble the highly capacitive behavior and high rate performance of their liquid counterparts. This demonstrates that high surface area, intricately porous activated carbon networks can still be readily accessible to polymer electrolytes, which is important to the transition of supercapacitor devices from liquid to solid-state. These materials and systems represent simple, sustainable and cost-effective approaches for next-generation solid thin, flexible energy storage devices.