Smart textile supercapacitors coated with conducting polymers for energy storage applications

Abstract

Over the last few years, the development of nanotechnology has resulted in generation of new materials and innovation for a wide range of applications and products. Among these applications, textile industry is expected to hold a considerable potential for the development of advanced nano-based materials. For example, nanotechnology enabled the production of novel smart "multifunctional" textiles with combined properties in one fabric. Conductive textiles represent a key class of smart textiles with promising future’s applications in areas such as electronic textiles, display devices, health monitoring devices, thermal and moisture management, flexible energy storage, and power generation devices. Recently, a remarkable attention has been devoted to the development of textile supercapacitor for energy storage and wearable electronics applications. Supercapacitor textiles offer advantages such as lightweight, flexibility, stretchability, and ease of integration with electronic textiles. Different approaches have been investigated for fabrication of smart conductive textiles for supercapacitor applications. Among these approaches, textiles coated with electrically conducting polymers (ECPs) are one of the most promising and facile approaches for fabrication of textile supercapacitors. ECP-coated textiles are characterized with high specific capacitance through fast redox reaction ease of integration into planar, flexible, and stretchable textile substrates with various shapes and large areas, thin film fabrication with controlled nanostructured morphology, and applicability for fabrication of composite and asymmetric textile supercapacitors. This chapter highlights the recent advances and developments in the fabrication of ECP-based textile supercapacitors, including different types of pure ECPs and their composites with other conducting materials for preparation of hybrid supercapacitors with superior performance for textile supercapacitor applications.