Textile-Based Ti3C2 MXene Capacitor by Laser Ablation Patterning

E-textile technologies are quickly advancing, but the power supply is still one of the limiting factors, particularly for those integrated into textiles. There is a pressing demand for flexible textile-based microdevices capable of storing and supplying energy. In this work, it is demonstrated that laser ablation (LA) can be conveniently used to achieve patterned thin film electrodes with interdigitated configuration on TPU-coated cotton fabric to produce textile-based energy storage units. Namely, Ti3C2 MXene (MX) electrodes were patterned via LA and coated with a LiCl based UV-curable gel polymer electrolyte to produce a textile-based flexible symmetrical capacitor. It is also shown that the LA process should be carefully designed to prevent electrode degradation during the process itself. The capacitance of textile-based MX symmetrical capacitors (MX Sy-Cs) ranged from 11.7 mF cm-2 to 0.53 mF cm-2 depending on the scan rate. By galvanostatic cycling at 100 µA cm-2, the average capacitance was 2.03 mF cm-2 with the C/C0 = 0.8 condition found after 9025 cycles. Moreover, an array of textile-based MX Sy-Cs is demonstrated to be compatible with low power textile energy storage applications.