Graphene-Fiber-Based Supercapacitors Favor N-Methyl-2-pyrrolidone/Ethyl Acetate as the Spinning Solvent/Coagulant Combination

One-dimensional flexible fiber supercapacitors (FSCs) have attracted great interest as promising energy-storage units that can be seamlessly incorporated into textiles via weaving, knitting, or braiding. The major challenges in this field are to develop tougher and more efficient FSCs with a relatively easy and scalable process. Here, we demonstrate a wet-spinning process to produce graphene oxide (GO) fibers from GO dispersions in N-methyl-2-pyrrolidone (NMP), with ethyl acetate as the coagulant. Upon chemical reduction of GO, the resulting NMP-based reduced GO (rGO) fibers (rGO@NMP-Fs) are twice as high in the surface area and toughness but comparable in tensile strength and conductivity as that of the water-based rGO fibers (rGO@H2O-Fs). When assembled into parallel FSCs, rGO@NMP-F-based supercapacitors (rGO@NMP-FSCs) offered a specific capacitance of 196.7 F cm–3 (147.5 mF cm–2), five times higher than that of rGO@H2O-F-based supercapacitors (rGO@H2O-FSCs) and also higher than most existing wet-spun rGO-FSCs, as well as those FSCs built with metal wires, graphene/carbon nanotube (CNT) fibers, or even pseudocapacitive materials. In addition, our rGO@NMP-FSCs can provide good bending and cycling stability. The energy density of our rGO@NMP-FSCs reaches ca. 6.8 mWh cm–3, comparable to that of a Li thin-film battery (4 V/500 μAh).