The effective storage of energy harvested from the environment (like sunlight, heat, and humidity) and human motion (like walking and running) is important to realise their practical applications in powering a variety of wearable electronics. However, traditional energy storage technologies are primarily designed to store energy generated from conventional sources, which are not suitable for the small amount and unstable sources of energy harvested by using flexible textile generators. To tackle these problems, Professor Xu Bingang’s team has successfully developed hybrid capacitors and batteries that efficiently store the energy harvested from textile generators in a stable manner. To make the energy storage device wearable, his team has also made efforts to develop a series of novel wearable supercapacitor devices that range from yarn supercapacitors, 2D and 3D fabric supercapacitors, 3D nonwoven supercapacitors, to embroidered supercapacitors, which have exceptional performance and promising applications for flexible and wearable energy storage.
More recently, Professor Xu Bingang and his team have made an innovative breakthrough in exploring novel materials and designs for high-performance hybrid supercapacitors to store energy. This breakthrough is based on their new scientific understanding and innovative design of highly active dual-type quantum dots (QDs) that are constructed within the interlayers of ultrathin layered double hydroxides for large energy storage systems. The expandable interlayer provides a suitable confined space for the growth and uniform dispersion of QDs, which has successfully resolved the existing challenges and difficulties in obtaining different types of and uniformly dispersed highly active QDs in a stable conductive microenvironment. With the newly developed highly active dual-type QDs, the hybrid supercapacitors have a high energy density of 329.2 μWh cm−2, capacitance retention of 99.1% and Coulomb efficiency of 96.9% after 22,000 cycles, which is superior to other reported works.
This work is published in Advanced Materials, a top-tier journal in materials science with an impact factor of 29.4. The first two authors are Dr Yang Qingjun and Miss Chung King-yan, Clarie (BA, 2019), a postdoctoral fellow and a PhD student under the supervision of Professor Xu.
