MOF Promoted Ternary Transition Metal Chalcogenide Embedded Carbon Fabric for Ultra-Long Life Flexible Energy Storage Application

Flexible-portable electronic devices have been deemed the future of innovative electronics. Due to the nature of such electronics, conventional power sources may no longer fulfill their physical and/or electrochemical necessities; hence, innovation in flexible power sources is a crucial requirement. Herein, we realized an ultrastable flexible electrode that can be used in various energy storage applications such as supercapacitors and batteries. Firstly, the flexible and conductive carbon fabric was electrochemically deposited with a nickel nanoseed layer (Ni/CC). Then, the ZIF-67 organometallic framework (MOF) nanostructures were grown over the Ni/CC substrate. As grown, nanostructures were then embedded inside the carbon fabric strands through a precise optimization process of varying the calcination temperature and gas concentrations. The Ni-Co-C co-embedded carbon fabric was then sulfurized via a series of carefully optimized hydrothermal conditions. Thus obtained metal sulfide embedded carbon fabric shows an excellent capacity when tested as a supercapacitor electrode in a three-electrode configuration. Moreover, when paired with the biomass-derived activated carbon, the asymmetric supercapacitor device shows almost 100 % of capacity retention even after 40 thousand charge-discharge cycles. Furthermore, several bending and twisting cycles were run to examine the integrity of the active material and no discernible capacity fading is observed. Hence, a unique metal chalcogenide composite electrode/substrate configuration has been proposed as a highly stable electrode material for flexible energy storage applications.