The present invention relates to a single fibre or thread supercapacitor, and in particular to a single fibre supercapacitor which is sufficiently flexible to be incorporated into textile material to enable the production of so-called ‘smart’ clothing. Supercapacitors in accordance with the invention can also be combined with photovoltaic fibres to produce a textile for electrical energy generation and storage.
Capacitors are components which store energy in an electrical field. Traditional capacitors are formed of two conductive plates separated by a dielectric (an insulating layer). When a potential difference is applied across the plates, one of them becomes positively charged and the other negatively charged and energy is stored in the electrostatic field.
Supercapacitors (also known as ultracapacitors) are a type of capacitor which does not have a conventional solid dielectric, but instead employ an electrolyte between two electrodes in which virtual plates are formed by the action of the electrodes on the electrolyte. Specifically, a double layer is formed between the surface of the electrode and the electrolyte, and there is a charge separation across this double layer which enables the electrostatic storage of electrical energy. This type of supercapacitor is therefore known as an “electric double-layer capacitor”. Conventional electric double-layer capacitors employ a separator to prevent the electrodes from contacting each other.
Another type of supercapacitor is the pseudocapacitor, in which the electrolyte takes part in redox reactions at the surface of the electrodes to result in a reversible faradaic charge transfer which enables energy storage.
Electrical energy can also be stored and delivered from batteries, which convert chemical energy to electrical energy by means of a redox reaction in the battery cells. Conventionally, batteries tend to be better at storing energy than capacitors (i.e. have a higher energy density) whereas capacitors tend to be better at delivering energy quickly than batteries (i.e. a higher power density). Modern rechargeable batteries such as lithium ion batteries are lighter than conventional batteries and retain a higher charge over a longer time period.
Electrochemical supercapacitors have many advantages over Li ion batteries with high power density, easy fabrication, low cost, long life time and a good safety record. In comparison to electrostatic capacitors, they have high energy storage ability. Many researches on supercapacitors have focused on applications in electric vehicles, hybrid electric vehicles and backup energy sources.
With the rapid development of the multifunction portable electronics and energy harvesting devices such as solar cells, it is difficult to integrate old fashioned bulky supercapacitors into these smart and textile electronics. Miniaturised, flexible and weaveable supercapacitors are in high demand and have been investigated. Recently there are some reports on fibre supercapacitors, these included those using carbon nanotube fibres (A. B. Dalton, S. Collins, E. Munoz, J. M. Razal, V. H. Ebron, J. P. Ferraris, J. N. Coleman, B. G. Kim and R. H. Baughman, Nature, 2003, 423, 703-703), ZnO—gold nanowires (J. Bae, M. Song, Y. Park, J. Kim, M. Liu and Z. Wang, Angew. Chem., Int. Ed., 2011, 50, 1683-1687), Chinese ink coated nickel wires (Y. P. Fu, X. Cai, H. W. Wu, Z. B. Lv, S. C. Hou, M. Peng, X. Yu and D. C. Zou, Advanced Materials, 2012, 24, 5713-5718), and a carbon nanotube-Ti nanotube fibre supercapacitor integrated with photoelectrical fibre (T. Chen, L. Qiu, Z. Yang, Z. Cai, J. Ren, H. Li, H. Lin, X. Sun and H. Peng, Angew. Chem., Int. Ed., 2012, 51, 11977-80). For all these fibre devices, two fibres were arranged either helically or in parallel and special care was taken to avoid short circuits.
Other supercapacitors are disclosed in JP 2010021168 A (Komatsu) and US 2005/040374 A1(Chittibabu).
For the reported 1D supercapacitors, PVA-H3PO4 served as electrolyte. Their applications have been hindered by an intrinsic potential window of 1V as almost all these devices operated at below 1V to avoid irreversible electrochemical reactions.
In accordance with a first aspect of the present invention, there is provided a supercapacitor comprising a single core having sequential coaxial layers of:
Preferably, the core is electrically conductive. If it is not then the first electrode must be electrically conducting. The core may be a fibre core.
The supercapacitor has a single core in contrast to prior art capacitors which comprise two parallel wires.
In a preferred embodiment, the layers extend around the entire circumference of the core, which may be formed from a metal (such as stainless steel), a polymer, carbon, or any combination thereof.
The surprising realisation of the present inventors is that if a gelled capacitor is employed, there is no need to employ a separate separator. This enables a single fibre supercapacitor to be formed, for example by dip-coating the coaxial layers onto the electrically conducting core. The absence of a separator (which would conventionally be formed from filter paper or a porous polymer for example) enables the supercapacitor to be formed around a core and avoids problems with the separator breaking when the fibre is flexed. Accordingly, in a preferred embodiment the supercapacitor does not have a conventional separator.
Gelled electrolytes are known (see for example Maher F. El-Kady, Veronica Strong, Sergey Dubin, Richard B. Kaner, Science, 2012, 335, 1326), but in a conventional flat plate electrochemical capacitor not a coaxial single fibre supercapacitor.
There have been were two previous attempts to make coaxial electrostatic capacitors but either they have very low capacitance or required delicate procedures, which have limited their applications (J. A. F. Gu, S. Gorgutsa and M. Skorobogatiy, Appl. Phys. Left., 2010, 97, 3; J. F. Gu, S. Gorgutsa and M. Skorobogatiy, Smart Mater. Struct., 2010, 19, 13; Z. Liu, R. Vajtai, F. Banhart, P. Sharma, J. Lou, P. Ajayan, Y. Zhan, G. Shi, S. Moldovan, M. Gharbi, L. Song, L. Ma, W. Gao and J. Huang, Nature communications, 2012, 3).
In a further embodiment, the supercapacitor may have the following additional layers:
The further electrodes, electrolytes and conductors may be formed from the same materials or different materials depending on the desired application.
This double layer single fibre supercapacitor has been found to exhibit a larger potential window with high energy per unit length with comparison to those of single supercapacitors. In particular, an extended electrochemical potential window of 2V and higher energy per length of thread were obtained when PVA-H3PO4 was employed as the electrolyte.
The double layer supercapacitor of the present invention is particularly advantageous as two capacitive layers can be operated as two single supercapacitors in series or in parallel.
The provision of two supercapacitors in one device is less bulky than providing two devices which is advantageous when it comes to applications in which space is at a premium.
In accordance with a second aspect of the present invention, there is provided a method of making a single fibre supercapacitor as defined above, wherein said layers are formed on the core by means of (preferably) dip coating, but alternatively spray coating, brush coating, extrusion coating, electrodeposition, plasma coating, curtain coating, vacuum deposition or any combination thereof.
Surprisingly, it has been found that these methods enable the manufacture of a single fibre supercapacitor which employs a gelled electrolyte and avoids the need for a separate separator layer. The gelled electrolyte is formed from a polymer and a conducting liquid. The gel electrolyte might be aqueous or organic based, or based on an ionic liquid. An example of an aqueous based gel electrolyte would be a mixture of PVA, (Poly(vinyl alcohol) phosphoric acid and water. An example of an organic gel electrolyte would be PMMA, (Poly(methyl methacrylate), ethylene carbonate, propylene carbonate, lithium tetrafluoroborate in THF, Tetrahydrofuran. An example of an ionic liquid based gel electrolyte would be a mixture of PVDF-HEP, (Poly(vinylidene fluoride-co-hexafluoropropylene) and [Bmim]Nf2, (1-Butyl-3-methylimidazolium trifluoromethanesulfonate) and acetone.
In accordance with a third aspect of the present invention, there is provided a single fibre supercapacitor, comprising an electrically conducting core having sequential coaxial layers of:
A number of preferred embodiments of the invention will now be described, with reference to the accompanying drawings, in which:
This relates to a coaxial single fibre single layer supercapacitor (CSFS) in accordance with the invention. Its capacitance and impedance were measured, and surface morphologies were investigated.
Experimental Section—Preparation of Coaxial Wire Supercapacitor
A 50 μm (in diameter) stainless steel wire was pre-treated using acetone for 10 minutes and 0.1M H2SO4 for 30 minutes in an ultrasonic water bath, rinsed using deionised water and dried in air.
A dip-coating method was used to coat Chinese ink, gel electrolyte, and an active carbon-gel layer onto the wire sequentially. Each coating of Chinese ink gave a layer of about 1.2 μm.
After it was dried in air, the electrode was dip-coated twice using gel electrolyte to form a separator. PVA-H3PO4 was used. When the gel is solidified, activated carbon slurry coating was conducted. The slurry was prepared using a composition of active carbon (AC): 5 wt % binder: solvent (1:1:4); the binder solution is 5 wt % PVA and 1M H3PO4in H2O. Here H3PO4 works as electrolyte in out layer of the supercapacitor. Finally, a silver paint layer was coated onto the wire as an outside layer-current collector. All chemicals were purchased from Sigma-Aldrich, and used as received without further purification. Stainless steel was purchased from Advent Research Material, Oxford. Chinese ink was produced by Shanghai Ink Corporation.
Surface and cross section structures were examined using scanning electron microscope FEG-SEM (Supra 35VP Carl Zeiss, Germany); all electrochemical measurements were conducted with a two-electrode setup using electrochemical workstation VersaStat 3.0 (Princeston Applied Research). The electrochemical impedance measurements were performed over 100 KHz-0.01 Hz with a 10 mV bias.
Results
The first and third active layers were prepared using Chinese ink 11 and activated carbon slurry 13 respectively; they serve as two large surface area electrodes in the supercapacitor. The second layer 12 was prepared using a PVA-H3PO4-H2O gel solution; this layer 12 serves as both the ion transport layer and separator between two electrodes 11,13.
The surface morphologies of the two active layers 11,13 and the cross section structure of the device were examined using scanning electron microscope FEG-SEM (Supra 35VP Carl Zeiss, Germany) and are shown in
Average thicknesses are measured as about 25 μm, about 75 μm and about 85 μm for the ink 11, gel electrolyte 12 and activated carbon 13 layers respectively.
Electrochemical measurements were conducted with a two-electrode setup using an electrochemical workstation VersaStat 3.0 (Princeton Applied Research). For electrochemical impedance measurements, a frequency range of 100 kHz-0.01 Hz with a 10 mV bias was employed. A 2.5 cm long coaxial single fibre supercapacitor was used throughout the experiments.
a shows typical cyclic voltammograms recorded at scan rates of 5, 10, 50 and 100 mV/s 2nd, 3rd and 4th scans are displayed in
b shows a typical galvanostatic charge-discharge curve at a current of 40 μA. A sharp potential drop at an early stage of the discharge is due to an iR drop. The specific capacitance per unit length was obtained using the equation CL=IΔt/(L(E−iRdrop)), where/is the charge-discharge current (A); Δt, the discharge time (s); L, the supercapacitor length (cm); E, the potential window (V). The value of CLwas calculated as 0.1 mFcm31 1. The specific capacitance per unit area was calculated using Cs=IΔt /(s(E−iRdrop)) where s is the surface area calculated by multiplying length and circumference of the first active layer ink coating surface.
Unlike two fibre supercapacitors, the two electrodes have a different circumference interface with gel electrolyte. The radius of the first active layer surface is measured as 50 μm, the surface area of this layer was calculated as 0.0785 cm2; the specific areal capacitance is 3.18 mFcm−2. This value is difficult to compare with reported values for two-fibre supercapacitors because different diameter fibres, and thickness of active coating layers were used; Areal specific capacitance in the range of 0.4-20.0 mFcm−2 has been reported as different volume of active material used.
EXAMPLE 2
This relates to a coaxial single fibre multiple capacitive layer supercapacitor in accordance with the invention. Its capacitance and impedance were measured, and surface morphologies were investigated.
In order to check that the rules for connecting capacitors in parallel or series are obeyed, two capacitive layers single fibre supercapacitor were fabricated and characterised. Their capacitances and electrochemical stability were studied. A dip coating method was employed for the fabrication of all the thread supercapacitors. A series of capacitive layers were coated onto conductive microwire or fibre sequentially using a dip coating method, each capacitive layer consists of ink-gel-ink-conductive paint layer.
Experimental Section—Preparation of Coaxial Wire Supercapacitor
A pre-wired bobbin was fixed onto the motor 51; a small weight 54 was clamped to the bottom end of the core wire 53, which keeps the wire taut and straight in an up-down alignment. The motor 51 has a two-direction controller which allows the load 54 to move up or down. When the coating process is performed, a drop of coating liquid 55 was applied to the centre of the disc such that the wire 53 moves through it. During the movement of the core wire 53 the liquid was dragged with it, the solvent evaporates, and a coating layer was formed on the wire 53. Different coating layers were coated onto the core microwire 53 sequentially. The thickness of each coating layer could be adjusted by coating time controlled by the motor speed; a motor speed of 0.5 m/minute was used throughout experiment.
The time interval between coatings is 2 minutes for ink and gel electrolyte coatings. A number of coatings were carried out for each layer to get the desired thickness. For a simple single supercapacitor thread 10/4/4/2 times coatings were performed for the three active layers and the silver paint layer respectively. Ink, 10 wt % H3PO4/8.3 wt % PVA gel electrolyte, silver paint were used throughout experiment for each layer coating. The process was repeated to form a two capacitive layer supercapacitor.
With reference to
a shows the photo of a 4.3 cm long coaxial two capacitive layer single fibre supercapacitor. It has three stainless steel wire connections: one to the core 70 and two attached to the two silver paint layers 71,72. The total diameter of the multilayer thread is about a third of a millimetre. The cross section structure of a similar device with copper wires 73,74 instead of stainless steel wires embedded in the silver paint device was examined using an optical microscope (Olympus BHM, Trinocular MTV-3 with Nikon Coolpix 990 3.34 MP Digital Camera, Japan).
b shows a cross section image of the device. The sample was prepared by sealing a segment of the coaxial fibre supercapacitor in a liquid polymer mixture, leaving it for 24 hours for solidification, cut and then polished. As the carbon layers are soft, and the gel electrolyte layer is flexible, the cross section was slightly distorted after polishing. The coating layers are relatively uniform as shown in
Results
Electrochemical measurements including cyclic voltammetry, galvanostatic charge-discharge and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy were conducted with a two-electrode setup using an electrochemical workstation VersaStat 3.0 (Princeton Applied Research). For electrochemical impedance measurements, a frequency range of 100 kHz-0.005 Hz with a 5 mV bias was employed.
Connections 1 and 2 (the inner capacitor, labelled on
Connections 2 and 3 (the outer capacitor, labelled on
Connections 2 and 1 and 3 connected together (two capacitors in parallel, labelled on
Connections 1 and 3 (two capacitors connected in series, labelled on
It can be seen from
C=A
CV/(v×V) (1)
Where C is the capacitance; ACV, the CV circled area; v, the scan rate and V, the potential window. Approximated capacitances for four circuits are 0.9, 1.3, 2.4 and 1.0 mF for circuits 1-2, 2-3, 2-13 and 1-3 respectively. No faradaic process was observed for all cases of electrical circuits indicating the gel electrolyte's stability in the system. The capacitance of a supercapacitor is dependent on the surface area of the electrodes and therefore is dependent on the mass of carbon coated. The greater the mass of carbon coated, the greater the capacitance. This is reflected in the observation that the inner capacitor has a smaller capacitance than the outer. The thickness may be the same but the mass or volume on the outer capacitor is greater as the volume of each layer is approximately 2 πrl where r is the average radius of the layer and l is the length of the thread.
Stored energy E can be calculated using equation (2):
E=1/2CV2 (2):
0.45, 0.65, 1.2 and 4.0 mJ were obtained for 1-2, 2-3, 2-13 and 1-3 respectively, which demonstrated that the coaxial two capacitive layers fibre supercapacitor stored higher energy than single capacitors and when they were connected in parallel.
For the 1-3 series connection, as a single fibre supercapacitor, it was demonstrated that, with a PVA H3PO4 gel electrolyte, the device can be operated within 2V potential; if compared to single capacitive layer device of the same capacitance, its stored energy would be twice of that of single one based on the equation (2).
The specific capacitance per unit length was obtained using the equation
C
L
=I Δt/(L(E−iRdrop)) (3),
where l is the charge-discharge current (A); Δt the discharge time (s); L the supercapacitor length (cm); and E the potential window (V). The value of CL was calculated as 1.26, 0.88, 1.66and 0.75 mF for 1-2, 2-3, 2-13 and 1-3 respectively.
In conclusion, we have developed a novel coaxial two capacitive layer single fibre supercapacitor with a high energy and extended potential window for the first time by using a dip coating method. The two capacitive layers were coated on a single stainless steel microwire sequentially. The fabrication procedures are robust, which has great potential for scale-up. Owing to its coaxial structure, the supercapacitor is lightweight, has excellent flexibility, a high energy density and a wide operating potential window. This device could be integrated with other portable electronics for self-powered back-up and with energy generators such as solar cells or piezoelectric devices. The concept and fabrication procedure is not only applicable to two capacitive layers and carbon-carbon symmetric configurations but also to many capacitive layers and asymmetric supercapacitors.
Number | Date | Country | Kind |
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1304033.2 | Mar 2013 | GB | national |
Filing Document | Filing Date | Country | Kind |
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PCT/GB2014/050657 | 3/6/2014 | WO | 00 |