Solid-State Supercapacitors

Dear Colleagues,

Current portable/wearable electronic devices such as mobile phones, smartwatch, cameras, activity trackers, and many more have greatly changed our lifestyles and brought significant convenience to us. Nevertheless, the increased energy consumption of these smart electronics requires improved energy storage devices. Electrochemical energy storage (EES) systems such as supercapacitors (SCs) and batteries are the most successful players and have been widely investigated in both academia and industry.

Supercapacitors (SCs) have attracted significant interest during the past several decades owing to their superior energy density (compared with conventional capacitors), good power density (compared with batteries), rapid charge/discharge rates, and long cycle life. However, traditional SCs exhibit clumsy bulk shapes (i.e., a separator sandwiched between two electrodes sealed in a liquid electrolyte), which presents some major drawbacks for their use in practical wearable applications.

Solid-state supercapacitors (SSCs) have emerged as a new class of energy storage devices and have attracted considerable attention in recent years. SSCs comprise electrodes, a solid-state gel electrolyte, a separator, and flexible packaging material similar to that of conventional SCs. The main advantage of SSCs over conventional SCs is their use of a solid-state gel electrolyte that can be assembled in thin, light, and smart designs of any shape and size, thereby increasing their potential for application in flexible and wearable electronics.

This Special Issue of Applied Sciences, “Solid-State Supercapacitor”, is planned to attract a broad and interdisciplinary audience and cover recent advancements in the following:

• The design and engineering of new electrode materials (metal oxides/chalcogenides, conducting polymers, MXenes, 2D-materials, graphene and nanocomposites) for SSCs;
• The synthesis of different gel-electrolytes such as aqueous, organic, ionic-liquid, and redox-active gel-electrolytes;
• The development of new cell configurations such as symmetric and asymmetric SSCs;
• The fabrication of different cell designs such as sandwich-type, planer, cable-type, wire-type, etc;
• Integrated SSCs (photo-supercapacitors).

Dr. Deepak P. Dubal
Prof. Prashant Sonar
Guest Editors

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• Nanostructured functional materials
• Symmetric solid-state supercapacitors
• Asymmetric solid-state supercapacitors
• Polymer gel-electrolytes
• Flexible, solid-state supercapacitors (flexible substrates)
• SSCs cell designs (fiber, cable-type, and planer)
• Integrated, solid-state supercapacitors