Flexible Paper and Cloth Substrates With Conductive Laser Induced Graphene Traces for Electroanalytical Sensing, Energy Harvesting and Supercapacitor Applications

Abstract

Flexible technology is the new era of technological innovations in a variety of applications such as sensors and energy harvesting. Development of conductive pathways on malleable materials, in an economic manner, plays a significant role in the field of wearable bioelectronics. In this work, a simple approach to fabricate flexible paper and textile based micro-devices has been discussed. The conductive traces on the substrates were created using an optimized laser ablation technique on the material coated substrate to form laser induced graphene (LIG) both on paper and cloth which as conductivity of 825 S/m and 720 S/m respectively. The proposed procedure is utilized as a conductive platform in developing three important designs each for biological sensing, energy harvesting and energy storage applications. From analysis it can seen that, pLIG had better catalytic performances by delivering high power density of <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$4.5 ~\mu \text{W}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> /cm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> , better LOD <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"> <tex-math notation="LaTeX">$1.31 ~\mu \text{M}$ </tex-math></inline-formula> and improved areal capacitance 15 mF/cm <sup xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">2</sup> Finally, the challenges and the future prospects for developing these novel wearable devices for numerous applications have been enumerated.