Grant: Strategic Projects - Group

Wearable electronics are an exciting new area of technological innovation that allows us to interface portable devices with our bodies, with the soon to be launched Apple watch exemplifying this emerging field. With practical implications in health monitoring, portable displays/sensors and high-performance sportswear, the primary limitation hindering wearable electronics becoming ubiquitous in everyday society is the lack of flexible and lightweight energy storage devices. Supercapacitors are an ideal energy storage means for these applications, providing numerous benefits over battery technologies in that they do not contain toxic or flammable components, have extremely long operational lifetimes. Major technical barriers associated with wearable supercapacitors are the lack of high energy density and flexible electrode materials. Our approach to solving the problem is to design wearable supercapacitors using graphene fiber materials recently produced in the PI' s lab which concurrently possesses the tri-functions with flexible, high surface area and electronic conductivity properties. The subsequent graphene fiber and composite fiber will be packaged to make fiber-type supercapacitor or weaved and packaged to make fabric-type supercapacitor. Through these novel design and performance improvement, the produced fiber-type or fabric-type supercapacitor will be flexible and prone to tailor to any wearable shape. It is expected that the results of the proposed research will provide a potential breakthrough of power device needed in wearable electronics and healthcare devices. The results of the proposed research will not only come out with high energy density wearable supercapacitors, but also expand and enhance the capability of relevant Canadian graphene production, energy and electronic industries thus contributing to the development of a knowledge-based Canadian economy. The proposed activity also aims to train highly qualified personnel (HQP) who will be critical in the development of next generation technologies in Canada and globally.