DNA-Inspired Supercoil Structured Fiber for Superelastic, Weavable Supercapacitors

Abstract

Stretchable and electrically conductive one dimensional fibers are important for diverse applications. Here we report the DNA supercoil structure inspired composite fibers which are highly stretchable, and electrically conductive. Carbon nanotube wrapped sheath on commercially available spandex core fibers were fabricated and giant twist was inserted for supercoiling. The resulting supercoiled composite fibers show highly ordered and compact structures along fiber direction, which enable superelasticity (up to 1300%). The supercoiled fiber exhibited stretch-invariant electrical property that very low resistance increase is observed for a fully stretch, when especially overcoated by passivation layer. Moreover, by incorporating pseudocapactive MnO2 active materials on the supercoiled fibers, we demonstrated the superelastic supercapacitors with high linear and areal capacitances, which are highly retained when reversibly deformed in the fiber direction.