Beyond A Simple Composite of Metal Oxide/Graphene/Carbon Nanotubes: Controlling Nanostructured Electrodes at Macroscopic Scale

5316 FFSCThe development of electronic textiles, which have many potential healthcare and consumer applications, is currently limited by a lack of energy storage that can be effectively incorporated into such devices while having sufficient energy density, power density, and durability to perform well. The overall goal of this work was to improve the energy density and potential for use in electronic textile applications of a nanostructured composite of few-walled carbon nanotubes, manganese oxide, and reduced graphene oxide by controlling its macroscopic structure. Two approaches towards this goal were pursued: one, to make fiber or wire-shaped electrodes via wet-spinning in aqueous chitosan solutions (10% acetic acid), and the other to make composite films with controlled porous structures using nitrocellulose as a sacrificial filler material. Both approaches yielded desired macroscopic structures. The composite fibers were non-conductive due to the insulating nature of MnO2 and its position on the surface of the fibers. Composite fibers of few-walled carbon nanotubes and reduced graphene oxide made by the same method found to have good electrochemical performance and flexibility. Nonintuitively, electrochemical performance of composite films declined with increasing porosity due to a decrease in conductivity, highlighting the importance of balancing the interplay between properties important to device performance when designing controlled structures of complex materials