Flexible fiber-shaped supercapacitors (FSSCs) are recently of extensive interest for portable and wearable electronic gadgets. Yet the lack of industrial-scale flexible fibers with high conductivity and capacitance and low cost greatly limits its practical engineering applications. To this end, we here present pristine twisted carbon fibers (CFs) coated with a thin metallic layer via electroless deposition route, which exhibits exceptional conductivity with ∼300% enhancement and superior mechanical strength (∼1.8 GPa). Subsequently, the commercially available conductive pen ink modified high conductive composite fibers, on which uniformly covered ultrathin nickel-cobalt double hydroxides (Ni-Co DHs) were introduced to fabricate flexible FSSCs. The synthesized functionalized hierarchical flexible fibers exhibit high specific capacitance up to 1.39 F·cm-2 in KOH aqueous electrolyte. The asymmetric solid-state FSSCs show maximum specific capacitance of 28.67 mF·cm-2 and energy density of 9.57 μWh·cm-2 at corresponding power density as high as 492.17 μW·cm-2 in PVA/KOH gel electrolyte, with demonstrated high flexibility during stretching, demonstrating their potential in flexible electronic devices and wearable energy systems.
Keywords: carbon fiber; flexible supercapacitor; nickel−cobalt double hydroxides; pen-ink electrode; wearable electronics.