Stretchable carbon nanotube based supercapacitors for future flexible textile electronics 11/25/2013 - 00:00 A mobile telephone display for your jacket sleeve, ECG probes for your workout clothes—wearable electronics are in demand. In order for textiles with built-in electronics to function over longer periods of time, all of the components need to be flexible and stretchable. In the journal Angewandte Chemie ("A Highly Stretchable, Fiber-Shaped Supercapacitor"), Chinese nanotechnology researchers have now introduced a new type of supercapacitor that fulfills this requirement. Its components are fiber-shaped and based on carbon nanotubes.For electronic devices to be incorporated into textiles or plastic films, their components must be stretchable. This is true for LEDS, solar cells, transistors, circuits, and batteries—as well as for the supercapacitors often used for static random access memory (SRAM). SRAM is often used as a cache in processors or for local storage on chips, as well as in devices that must maintain their data over several years with no source of power.
