Textile-Based Stretchable Supercapacitors with Liquid Metal Current Collectors

Stretchable supercapacitors (SCs) have attracted attention as energy storage devices for wearable electronics due to their excellent power performance, low heat generation, and ease of integration into clothing. This paper presents a stretchable SC composed of liquid metal current collectors on textile substrates. For the liquid metal and textile-based supercapacitors (LM/Tex SCs), the wetting characteristics and electrical resistance of the liquid metal on different types of textile substrates are investigated. The wettability of the carbon nanotube suspension for an electrochemically active material is also affected by the chemical and structural properties of the textile substrates. The intrinsically stretchable LM/Tex SCs are fabricated by sandwiching a soft gel electrolyte layer between the two liquid metal and textile-based electrodes. The optimized SCs based on the polyester/neoprene textile exhibit a high areal capacitance of 527.8 mF cm(-2) and maintain more than 90% of their initial capacitance after 1000 repetitive stretching cycles. Finally, it is demonstrated that the LM/Tex SC is readily integrated into a shirt and reliably supplies electrical energy to light up a light-emitting diode even under human motion.