Polyhedron carbon-scale stacking foldable fibrous film electrode with high capacitance performance from chitin fiber cloth for super flexible supercapacitors

This work is concerned with exploring high-performance flexible carbon electrode materials for supercapacitors derived from low-cost commercially-available fabrics. Herein, through direct carbonization without any additional pre-treated process and without any activators as well as any templates, we explored different carbonization temperatures to develop a super flexible carbon film derived from chitin fiber textile. The as-obtained carbon fibrous films are found to possess a novel unique microstructure and ultra-high specific surface areas (up to 382.2 m2 g−1), formed via irregular stacking and inter-connection of numerous polyhedron carbon-scales with much crevices and grooves. They present super high mechanical flexibility capable of being repeatedly folded and exhibited a very high capacitance performance with a maximum specific capacitance of up to 114.9 F g−1 at 1 A g−1 and an excellent cycling performance with about 94.0% of capacitance retention after 5000 charge-discharge cycles at 1 A g−1. The carbon fibrous film from biomass textiles shows great promise for applications as flexible electrode in energy storage.