Cyclic Bending Reliability and Failure Mechanism of Printed Biodegradable Flexible Supercapacitor on Polymer Substrate

Zhao Fu*, Markus Hannula, Aarne Jauho, Kaisa Leena Väisänen, Marja Välimäki, Jari Keskinen, Matti Mäntysalo*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticleScientificpeer-review

20 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

A flexible supercapacitor (SC) is an attractive energy storage device for powering low-power sensors, since it can be built using only nontoxic and sustainable materials. In this study, the advantages of using biodegradable polylactic acid (PLA) substrate for printed SC are investigated by studying the SC's cyclic bending reliability, failure mechanism, and the impact of the bending radius. The results confirm that the SCs with laminated PLA with polymer barrier substrate exhibited the highest bending reliability, stability, and capability in preventing liquid electrolyte evaporation among the investigated substrates. Besides, the reliability decreased with the decreasing bending radius only when the strongly impacted areas lie on the electrode, the flaking and cracking of which was found to be the failure mechanisms of the tested SCs, except for the SCs with PLA/Al substrate, which failed due to the Al cracking. This research suggests that using PLA/barrier substrate, developing more robust activated carbon electrodes, developing cellulose paper with more dense fiber structure and smaller porous areas, and controlling the bending radius are crucial to improving the SC's reliability.

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)40145-40157
JournalACS Applied Materials and Interfaces
Volume14
Issue number35
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 7 Sept 2022
MoE publication typeA1 Journal article-refereed

Funding

This work is part of the ECOtronics project, which is funded by Business Finland (Grant Nos. 2660/31/2019 and 1423/31/2019) and InComEss project, which is funded by the European Commission (Grant No. 1423/31/2019). Parts of the research used the Academy of Finland Research Infrastructure “Printed Intelligence Infrastructure” (PII-FIRI, Grant No. 320019). This work made use of Tampere Microscopy Center facilities at Tampere University.

Keywords

  • cyclic bending reliability
  • failure mechanism
  • flexible supercapacitor
  • PLA/barrier
  • printed electronics

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