Pencil drawn paper based supercapacitors

Down, MP, Foster, CW, Ji, X and Banks, CE (2016) Pencil drawn paper based supercapacitors. RSC Advances, 6 (84). pp. 81130-81141. ISSN 2046-2069

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Abstract

© 2016 The Royal Society of Chemistry. This is the first comprehensive analysis of paper-based supercapacitors, P-SCs, that are produced utilising commercially available pencils to draw an interdigitated design upon common household printing paper, developing cheap, green and reliable low profile electrical conductors and electrodes. The P-SCs are optimised in terms of the composition of pencil used, the number of layers and the analysis of single or double sided interdigitated electrode designs; such a comprehensive study is seldom explored in previous literature. A full analysis of the physical and electrochemical properties of the pencil drawn electrodes has been performed, including the application of a new capacitive testing/evaluation circuit applied to charge/discharge measurements/analysis, which provides a revolutionary and unambiguous analysis of the capacitance of the fabricated electrodes; an easy to use experiment guide is presented. The P-SCs are benchmarked using 0.1 M H 2 SO 4 as the aqueous electrolyte. The P-SCs demonstrate a specific capacitance of ∼10.6 μF mg -1 at a charge current of 0.46 A g -1 . The P-SCs are integrated into a novel pouch design, providing a flexible, cheap and easily manufactured supercapacitor, which demonstrates a capacitance of ∼101.4 μF, exhibiting a specific capacitance of ∼42.4 μF g -1 at a current density of 0.46 A g -1 , exhibiting energy and power densities of ∼0.45 J mg -1 (0.125 mW h mg -1 ) and ∼0.03 W mg -1 respectively. The pouch cell, fabricated from P-SCs, utilises five parallel double-sided pencil drawn electrodes, with paper separators, and retains 82.2% of its maximum capacitance, after 5121 charge/discharge cycles at a current density of 0.09 A g -1 . Last, a solid state P-SC is developed utilising a PVA-H 2 SO 4 solid electrolyte, which demonstrates a specific capacitance of 141.8 μF g -1 , at a charging current of 4.33 μA g -1 .