Lithium-Sulfur Battery Cable Made from Ultralight, Flexible Graphene/Carbon Nanotube/Sulfur Composite Fibers

The emergence of flexible and wearable electronic devices with shape amenability and high mobility has stimulated the development of flexible power sources to bring revolutionary changes to daily lives. The conventional rechargeable batteries with fixed geometries and sizes have limited their functionalities in wearable applications. The first-ever graphene-based fibrous rechargeable batteries are reported in this work. Ultralight composite fibers consisting of reduced graphene oxide/carbon nanotube filled with a large amount of sulfur (rGO/CNT/S) are prepared by a facile, one-pot wet-spinning method. The liquid crystalline behavior of high concentration GO sheets facilitates the alignment of rGO/CNT/S composites, enabling rational assembly into flexible and conductive fibers as lithium-sulfur battery electrodes. The ultralight fiber electrodes with scalable linear densities ranging from 0.028 to 0.13 mg cm(-1) deliver a high initial capacity of 1255 mAh g(-1) and an areal capacity of 2.49 mAh cm(-2) at C/20. A shape-conformable cable battery prototype demonstrates a stable discharge characteristic after 30 bending cycles.