Highly Sensitive and Stable Flexible Smart Sensors Based on Commercial Carbon Fiber Powder Inks.

With the fast development of the smart lifestyle in recent years, simple and flexible body condition monitoring has become more and more important. However, currently, commercially available motion-sensing devices always lack flexibility or at a high cost. This article has fully explored the merits of a commercial and easily available material of carbon fiber powder (CFP) and prepared CFP-based screen printing inks. This conductive ink can be directly and quickly printed onto a variety of different flexible common substrates, such as paper, cotton fabrics, etc., to prepare flexible sensors. At the same time, as a result of the good photothermal performance and conductivity of CFP, the printed flexible sensors have fast and stable performance on thermal and human motion detection. The use of CFP as the smart element to construct a wearable device will offer a choice for the intelligent industry.

From Spent Lithium-Ion Batteries to Low-Cost Li4SiO4 Sorbent for CO2 Capture.

The huge consumption of fossil fuels leads to excessive CO2 emissions, and its reduction has become an urgent worldwide concern. The combination of renewable energies with battery energy storage, and carbon capture, utilization, and storage are well acknowledged as two major paths in achieving carbon neutrality. However, the former route faces the discard problem of a large amount of lithium-ion batteries (LIBs) due to their limited lifespan, while it is costly to obtain effective CO2-capturing materials to put the latter into implementation. Herein, for the first time, we propose a route to synthesize low-cost Li4SiO4 as CO2 sorbents from spent LIBs, verify the technical feasibility, and evaluate the CO2 adsorption/desorption performance. The results show that Li4SiO4 synthesized from the cathode with self-reduction by the anode graphite of LIBs has a superior CO2 capacity and cyclic stability, which is constant at around 0.19 g/g under 15 vol % CO2 after 80 cycles. Moreover, the cost of fabricating sorbents from LIBs is only 1/20-1/3 of the conventional methods. We think this work can not only promote the recycling of spent LIBs but also greatly reduce the cost of preparing Li4SiO4 sorbents, and thus could be of great significance for the development of CO2 adsorption.