All-Printed In-Plane Supercapacitors by Sequential Additive Manufacturing Process

Supercapacitors are attractive due to their high power density and durability relative to batteries. Printing technology has been rapidly emerging as manufacturing friendly, with a quick turn around and low-cost approach to produce a variety of devices. Herein, we show an end-to-end printing of supercapacitors including the substrate, current collector and active layers, and a gel polymer electrolyte, all simply printed. Two types of supercapacitors, electrochemical double-layer capacitor (EDLC) and pseudocapacitor (PC), were developed with activated carbon and graphene-Mn3O4 nanocomposite-based active layers, respectively. The all-printed supercapacitors show specific power and specific energy of 800.3 W/kg and 1.17 Wh/kg (at 0.5 A/g) for the EDLC and 1601 W/kg and 10.6 Wh/kg (at 1 A/g) for the PC. Extended durability tests reveal that the EDLC exhibits negligible performance deviation after 100 000 charge/discharge cycles while the PC shows less than 10% capacitance degradation after 25 000 cycles.