Wire-Shaped Supercapacitors with Organic Electrolytes Fabricated via Layer-by-Layer Assembly

A wire-shaped supercapacitor (WSS) has structural advantages of high flexibility and ease of incorporation into conventional textile substrates. In this work, we report a thin reproducible WSS fabricated via layer-by-layer (LbL) assembly of multiwalled carbon nanotubes (MWCNTs), combined with an organic electrolyte of propylene carbonate (PC)–acetonitrile (ACN)–lithium perchlorate (LiClO4)–poly(methyl methacrylate) (PMMA) that extends the voltage window to 1.6 V. The MWCNTs were uniformly deposited on a curved surface of a thin Au wire using an LbL assembly technique, resulting in linearly increased areal capacitance of the fabricated WSS. Vanadium oxide was coated on the LbL-assembled MWCNT electrode to induce pseudocapacitance, hence enhancing the overall capacitance of the fabricated WSS. Both the cyclic stability of the WSS and the viscosity of the electrolyte could be optimized by controlling the mixing ratio of PC to ACN. As a result, the fabricated WSS exhibits an areal capacitance of 5.23 mF cm–2 at 0.2 mA cm–2, an energy density of 1.86 μ W h cm–2, and a power density of 8.5 mW cm–2, in addition to a high cyclic stability with a 94% capacitance retention after 10 000 galvanostatic charge–discharge cycles. This work demonstrates a great potential of the fabricated scalable WSS in the application to high-performance textile electronics as an integrated energy storage device.