Highly conductive and flexible thin film electrodes based on silver nanowires wrapped carbon fiber networks for supercapacitor applications
![Highly conductive and flexible thin film electrodes based on silver nanowires wrapped carbon fiber networks for supercapacitor applications](uploads/publications/a7dd3e33455a754ea51e3168bc90e984.jpg)
Flexible electrodes with high conductivity and mechanical properties play an important role in many essentialelectronic devices. Herein, we report the fabrication offlexible and conductive PDMS/AgNWs/CFs thinfilm byusing a simple inverted layer-by-layer deposition method. In this structure, conductive carbonfiber (CF) net-works embedding in the elastic polymers will help improve the ability to resist deformation of pure poly-dimethylsiloxane (PDMS)film. Elongated silver nanowires (AgNWs) wrapping on bare CFs can greatly increasethe active surface area, improve the electron transfer of CFs, and reduce the contact resistance between theadjacent CFs. As a result, aflexible PDMS/AgNWs/CFs thinfilm with a low sheet resistance of 0.99Ω/â–¡wasobtained. The fabricated PDMS/AgNWs/CFs thinfilm showed great mechanicalflexibility with less than 3%decrease in resistance after 275 continuous bending and releasing processes. Moreover, an induced reducedgraphene oxide (rGO) layer on the AgNWs wrapped CF networks increases the active surface area. Physical andelectrochemical characterization of the fabricated PDMS/AgNWs/CFs and PDMS/AgNWs/rGO/CFs thinfilmelectrodes have been measured. The tightly attached AgNWs and well-coated rGO materials improved highsurface area and provided benefit for fast accessibility of electrolyte ions into the microporous structures, in-dicating the considerable potential for use inflexible supercapacitor applications