Ti₃C₂ MXene as Additive for Low-Cost Textile Supercapacitors with Enhanced Electrical Performance

Textile-based energy storage components are paramount for establishing invisible electronic textiles that do not require conventional rigid batteries. A novel and scalable fabrication method is reported for introducing MXene (Ti3C2Tx) into activated carbon (AC) supercapacitors to enhance electrochemical performance. Supercapacitors are prepared within a single layer of textile with a phase-inverted polymer membrane fabricated within the textile yarn structure to form a porous, flexible, and mechanically durable separator. MXene is introduced in two different forms: 1) A multilayer MXene (m-MXene)powder is mechanically mixed with an AC slurry and deposited onto the textile. 2) Delaminated MXene (d-Mxene) nanosheets are spray-coated onto the surface of spray coated AC electrode. With an organic electrolyte, 1 M tetraethylammonium tetrafluoroborate in dimethyl sulfoxide, these supercapacitors are electrochemically stable between +/- 2.6 V and demonstrate a maximum areal capacitance of 148.7 mF cm(-2), an energy density of 0.921 mWh cm(-2), and a power density of 1.01 mW cm(-2). The addition of MXenes improves the areal capacitance and by combining both approaches an improvement of 220% is achieved compared with identical supercapacitors with standard AC electrodes. The novelty of this work is to develop a scalable and straightforward solution processing method for introducing MXene into carbon supercapacitor electrodes enabling high-performance textile-based energy storage devices.