Screen Printable Electrochemical Capacitors on Flexible Substrates

Abstract

This work presents a novel approach for the fabrication of Electrochemical Capacitors (ECs) based on the screen-printing of a commercial carbon-based conductive ink on flexible substrates. This technique enables the fast and cost-effective production of ECs with high flexibility and outstanding performance over bending states and voltage cycling, as demonstrated by means of cyclic voltammetry and galvanometric charge-discharge measurements. Despite the fact that the specific areal capacitances achieved are lower than the ones obtained using other carbon-based materials (~22 μF/cm2), the results show that, as soon as new screen-printable carbon-based pastes become available, this fabrication method will enable the mass production of ECs that can be attached to any surface as a conformal patch, as it is being required by a large number of the emerging technological applications.