Highly deformation-tolerant carbon nanotube sponges as supercapacitor electrodes

• DOI: 10.1039/c3nr01932b
• Publication Date: 2013-07-11T10:35:30Z
• Authors: Peixu Li; Chuiyan Kong; Yuanyuan Shang; Enzheng Shi; Yuntao Yu; Weizhong Qian; Fei Wei; Jinquan Wei; Kunlin Wang; Hongwei Zhu; Anyuan Cao; Dehai Wu
• Keywords: Carbon fibers

Developing flexible and deformable supercapacitor electrodes based on porous materials is of high interest in energy related fields. Here, we show that carbon nanotube sponges, consisting highly conductive networks, can serve as compressible deformation-tolerant aqueous or organic electrolytes. In electrolytes, the sponges maintain a similar specific capacitance (>90% original value) under predefined compressive strain 50% (corresponding to volume reduction 50%), retain more than 70% 80% while normalized increases by 3-fold. The sponge electrode maintains stable performance after 1000 large compression cycles. A coin-shaped cell assembled with these shows excellent stability over 15 000 charging cycles negligible degradation 500 Our results indicate have potential fabricate performance.