Paper-based Flexible Supercapacitors with drawn van der Waals materials

TL;DR

This paper presents a simple, low-cost method for creating flexible supercapacitors using hand-drawn 2D material traces on paper, demonstrating promising electrochemical performance and durability for wearable applications.

Contribution

It introduces a novel, easy technique to fabricate flexible supercapacitors with drawn 2D materials on paper, showing enhanced performance and flexibility over traditional methods.

Findings

Pencil-drawn paper electrodes achieve ~6.39 F/g capacitance.

Heterostructure electrodes show long cyclic stability.

Supercapacitors retain performance under bending.

Abstract

Two-dimensional (2D) materials are widely used in various applications due to their extraordinary properties. In particular, their electrochemical stability, low electrical resistance, and huge specific surface area make them very interesting active materials for supercapacitors. Herein, flexible, biodegradable, and low-cost supercapacitors are introduced in a very simple way based on hand-drawing pencil traces or -rubbing molybdenum disulfide (MoS2), titanium trisulfide (TiS3) and franckeite traces on the paper. Results demonstrate that pencil-drawn paper has higher capacitance performance (~6.39 F/g) among the suggested electrodes. Interestingly, the introduced MoS2/pencil, TiS3/pencil, and franckeite/pencil drawn paper electrodes reveal dramatic improvements with long cyclic life thanks to the occurrence of synergetic effects and higher available active cites within the heterostructures. Moreover, the assembled symmetric solid-state supercapacitors retain their performance even under applied bending, indicating their excellent potential for wearable/flexible applications.