A Highly Elastic and Reversibly Stretchable All-Polymer Supercapacitor

Abstract

Multiple stretchability has never been demonstrated as supercapacitors because the hydrogel used cannot fully recover after being heavily deformed. Now, a highly reversibly stretchable all-polymer supercapacitor was fabricated using a developed double network hydrogel (DN hydrogel) as electrolyte and pure polypyrrole (PPy) as electrode. The DN hydrogel provides excellent mechanical properties, which can be stretched up to 500 % many times and then restore almost 100 % of the original length. To fabricate the fully recoverable stretchable supercapacitor, we annealed a free-standing pure conducting polymer film as electrode so that the electrodes induced retardance is minimized. The as-fabricated DN hydrogel/pure conducting polymer supercapacitors can be perfectly recovered from 100 % strain with almost no residual deformation left and the electrochemical performance can be maintained even after 1000 stretches (but not bending).