Biomass-derived, multifunctional and wave-layered carbon aerogels toward wearable pressure sensors, supercapacitors and triboelectric nanogenerators

Nowadays, great effort has been devoted to designing carbon aerogels with compressibility, elasticity, wide linear sensitivity and multifunctional characteristics. Herein, a biomass-mediated strategy was applied to synthesize nitrogen doped carbon aerogels (C-NGD) by using the calcinated mixture of glucose & dicyandiamide nanosheets (C-GD) and cellulose nanofibers (CNFs) as sustainable, cheap and massive precursors. The synthesized C-NGD has considerable elasticity, compressibility and fatigue resistance. The interaction between C-GD and CNFs leads to a super stable wave-layered structure that can support an ultrahigh compression strain (95%) and long-term compression (3000 cycles, at a 50% strain). Particularly, a wide-range linear sensitivity can be obtained under 0–10 kPa, with a high sensitivity of 10.08 kPa−1. These advantages enable the carbon aerogel to be applied in wearable piezoresistive sensing devices to detect body motion and biosignals. Besides, C-NGD also shows potential applications for supercapacitors and triboelectric nanogenerators. Thus, this biomass-derived carbon aerogel is a kind of multifunctional material toward flexible electronics, and energy conversion/storage devices.