From industrially weavable and knittable highly conductive yarns to large wearable energy storage textiles

Abstract

Wearable electronic textiles that store capacitive energy are a next frontier in personalized electronics. However, the lack of industrially weavable and knittable conductive yarns in conjunction with high capacitance, limits the wide-scale application of such textiles. Here pristine soft conductive yarns are continuously produced by a scalable method with the use of twist-bundle-drawing technique, and are mechanically robust enough to be knitted to a cloth by a commercial cloth knitting machine. Subsequently, the reduced-graphene-oxide-modified conductive yarns covered with a hierarchical structure of MnO<inf>2</inf> nanosheets and a polypyrrole thin film were used to fabricate weavable, knittable and wearable yarn supercapacitors. The resultant modified yarns exhibit specific capacitances as high as 36.6 mF cm^-1 and 486 mF cm^-2 in aqueous electrolyte (three-electrode cell) or 31 mF cm^-1 and 411 mF cm^-2 in all solid-state two-electrode cell. The symmetric solid-state supercapacitor has high energy densities of 0.0092 mWh cm^-2 and 1.1 mWh cm^-3 (both normalized to the whole device) with a long cycle life. Large energy storage textiles are fabricated by weaving our flexible all-solid-state supercapacitor yarns to a 15 cm × 10 cm cloth on a loom and knitting in a woollen wrist band to form a pattern, enabling dual functionalities of energy storage capability and wearability.