Towards Textile Energy Storage from Cotton T‐Shirts

Abstract

A simple chemical activation route is developed to convert insulating cotton T-shirt textiles into highly conductive and flexible activated carbon textiles (ACTs) for energy-storage applications. Such conversion gives these ACTs an ideal electrical double-layer capacitive behavior. The constructed asymmetric supercapacitors based on the ACTs and MnO(2)/ACT composite show superior electrochemical performances.

Biomass-derived renewable carbon materials for electrochemical energy storage

“…More interestingly, some biomaterials, such as hemps and cotton fibers, also exhibit exceptional mechanical robustness and eminent flexibility after activation, which can be used for fabricating flexible power sources. In our previous works, activated cotton textiles have been proven to be ideal flexible substrates to prepare flexile supercapacitors [31][32][33]129]. …”

“…In our previous work, we have successfully converted flexible, green and breathable cotton textile into activated carbon textile (ACT), which not only inherited the textile architecture and porous structure of cotton fiber, but also exhibited excellent conductivity and outstanding flexibility [30]. The obtained ACT has been proven to be an ideal flexible substrate to deposit active nanoparticles for flexible supercapacitors and lithium-ion batteries [31][32][33][34]. Activated banana peels possess hierarchically layered porous structure, which exhibited superior electrochemical performance when being used as sulfur host for lithium-sulfur batteries.…”

Carbon Nanomaterials for Flexible Energy Storage

“…In this case, cotton textiles and polyester fabrics coated with CNTs or graphene that was discussed in the previous section are excellent choices ( Figure 6). [71,[87][88][89] The macroporous nature of these substrates making them capable of loading much more MnO 2 and densities up to ∼8 mg/cm 2 was successfully demonstrated using CNTs coated textiles. [87] Using these substrates, a high capacitance of 410 F/g was obtained when the MnO 2 loading was 0.06 mg/cm 2 .…”

Recent advances and challenges of stretchable supercapacitors based on carbon materials

“…5e), and delivered a considerably higher maximum energy density of 0.15 mW h cm −3 (11 W h kg −1 ). Moreover, textiles or papers are directly used as two-dimensional substrates to carry electrochemical active materials [94,102,103]. With a simple "dipping and drying" process using SWNT ink, Hu et al [94] produced highly conductive textiles ( and high specific capacitance of 62 F g −1 at a current density of 1 mA cm −2 , which was well maintained after being subjected to 100 stretching cycles with 120% elongation.…”