Cross-section wood (CW) is generally used as a host for
free-standing
electrodes, as the abundant opened pores can provide large space for
loading guest materials with high electrical conductivity and electrochemical
activity. However, there is still a challenge for CW to be used in
flexible supercapacitors (SCs) because of its low mechanical strength.
Herein, as an alternative to CW, vertical-section wood (VW) with excellent
mechanical strength and good flexibility is developed and used as
a free-standing and flexible electrode by using Ti3C2T
x
(MXene) with ultrahigh conductivity
and good electrochemical activity as a guest material. In particular,
the highly accessible bonding interface for Ti3C2T
x
is first built by delignification
on VW to generate abundant pores for continuously absorbing Ti3C2T
x
and to expose
cellulose with abundant oxygen-containing groups for stable combination
with Ti3C2T
x
. Then,
cyclic pressing is used to form negative pressure to pump the Ti3C2T
x
suspension into
VW, combining with a preheating process to trigger layer-by-layer
self-assembly of Ti3C2T
x
nanosheets onto a wood cell wall by evaporating water in the
suspension. As a result, the free-standing electrode has a large Ti3C2T
x
loading mass proportion
of 33 wt %, a high conductivity of 3.14 S cm–1,
and good flexibility with much higher mechanical strength of 15.1
MPa than 0.4 MPa of CW. The symmetric SC delivers a good specific
capacitance of 805 mF cm–2 at 0.5 mA cm–2, a remarkably high rate capability of 84% to 10 mA cm–2, and an energy density of 13.85 μW h cm–2 at 87.5 μW cm–2. Additionally, this SC shows
a long lifespan of 90.5% after 10,000th charge and discharge cycles
even at a constant bending angle of 90°, suggesting promising
potential in flexible devices.