Inkjet printed highly transparent and flexible graphene micro-supercapacitors

Abstract

Modern energy storage devices for portable and wearable technologies must fulfill a number of requirements, such as small size, flexibility, thinness, reliability, transparency, manufacturing simplicity and performance, in order to be competitive in an ever expanding market. To this end, a comprehensive inkjet printing process is developed for the scalable and low-cost fabrication of transparent and flexible micro-supercapacitors. These solid-state devices, with printed thin films of graphene flakes as interdigitated electrodes, exhibit excellent performance versus transparency (ranging from a single-electrode areal capacitance of 16 μF cm⁻² at transmittance of 90% to a capacitance of 99 μF cm⁻² at transmittance of 71%). Also, transparent and flexible devices are fabricated, showing negligible capacitance degradation during bending. The ease of manufacturing coupled with their great capacitive properties opens up new potential applications for energy storage devices ranging from portable solar cells to wearable sensors.