Air-Stable Conductive Polymer Ink for Printed Wearable Micro-Supercapacitors

Printed electronics are expected to facilitate the widespread distributed wearable electronics in the era of the Internet of things. However, developing cheap and stable electrode inks remains a significant challenge in the printed electronics industry and academic community. Here, overcoming the weak hydrophilicity of polyaniline, a low-cost, easy-fabricating, and air-stable conducting polymer (CP) ink is devised through a facile assemble-disperse strategy delivering a high conductivity in the order of 10(-2) S cm(-1) along with a remarkable specific capacitance of 386.9 F g(-1) at 0.5 A g(-1) (dehydrated state). The additive-free CP ink is directly employed to print wearable micro-supercapacitors (MSCs) via the spray-coating method, which deliver a high areal capacitance (96.6 mF cm(-2)) and volumetric capacitance (26.0 F cm(-3)), outperforming most state-of-the-art CP-based supercapacitors. This work paves a new approach for achieving scalable MSCs, thus rendering a cost-effective, environmentally friendly, and pervasive energy solution for next-generation distributed electronics.

Automated summary

This study developed a low-cost, easy-to-fabricate, and stable conducting polymer ink for wearable micro-supercapacitors with high capacitance and conductivity. This research provides a new approach for scalable micro-supercapacitors in next-generation distributed electronics.