Hemp Lignin and Future Energy Storage Devices that Self Heal

Abstract: Superior self-healability and stretchability

 are critical elements for the practical wide-scale adoption of personalized electronics such as portable and wearable energy storage devices. However, the low healing efficiency of self-healable supercapacitors and the small strain of stretchable supercapacitors are fundamentally limited by conventional polyvinyl alcohol-based acidic electrolytes, which are intrinsically neither self-healable nor highly stretchable.

Self-healing performance of the supercapacitor comprising the VSNPs-PAA polyelectrolyte.

Here we report

 an electrolyte comprising polyacrylic acid dual crosslinked by hydrogen bonding and vinyl hybrid silica nanoparticles, which displays all superior functions and provides a solution to the intrinsic self-healability and high stretchability problems of a supercapacitor. 

Supercapacitors with this electrolyte are non-autonomic self-healable, retaining the capacitance completely even after 20 cycles of breaking/healing. 

These supercapacitors are stretched up to 600% strain with enhanced performance using a designed facile electrode fabrication procedure.

Schematics of fabrication strategies for specific functional supercapacitors.

A self-healable and highly stretchable supercapacitor based on a dual crosslinked polyelectrolyte Huang, Y. et al. A self-healable and highly stretchable supercapacitor based on a dual crosslinked polyelectrolyte. Nat. Commun. 6:10310 doi: 10.1038/ncomms10310 (2015)