Stretchable supercapacitors to power tomorrow’s wearable devices

Date posted
Funding Agency
(Funded by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute of Food and Agriculture/U.S. Department of Agriculture)

Researchers at Duke University and Michigan State University have engineered a novel type of supercapacitor that remains fully functional even when stretched to eight times its original size. It does not exhibit any wear and tear from being stretched repeatedly and loses only a few percentage points of energy performance after 10,000 cycles of charging and discharging. To make the stretchable supercapacitors, the researchers first grew a carbon nanotube forest—a patch of millions of nanotubes just 15 nanometers in diameter and 20-30 micrometers in length—on top of a silicon wafer. The researchers then coated a thin layer of gold nanofilm on top of the carbon nanotube forest.