Researchers make advance towards stretchable electronics
1 min read
Looking to bring stretchable electronics into the mainstream, researchers at the University of Delaware are developing scalable, stretchable power sources using carbon nanotube macrofilms, polyurethane membranes and organic electrolytes.
The advance, they believe, could lead to bendable, stretchy electronic devices such as mobile phones, tablets and laptops, as well as biomedical, wearable, portable and sensory devices, such as cyber skin for robotic devices and implantable electronics.
"Advances in soft and stretchable substrates and elastomeric materials have given rise to an entirely new field," said Bingqing Wei, a mechanical engineering professor at Delaware. "Rechargeable and stretchable energy storage devices, also known as supercapacitors, are urgently needed to complement advances currently being made in flexible electronics."
To reveal a stretchable supercapacitator's true performance, Wei and his team examined the system's electrochemical behaviour using buckled single wall nanotube electrodes and an elastomeric separator.
According to Wei, the supercapacitor developed in his lab achieved excellent stability in testing, and the results are expected to provide important guidelines for future design and testing of this leading edge energy storage device.
The work was recently published in the journal Nano Letters.
