Researchers from Australia and Ireland developed a flexible yarn made from graphene oxide. This strong, lightweight, highly conductive and high capacitance fiber may be a great material for wearable textiles.

The researchers report that the new yarns and fibers exhibit the best electrochemical capacitance ever - of as high as 410 F/g. To create the fiber, the researchers used a novel wet-spinning technique that can produce both GO and r-GO yarns of unlimited lengths. Those yarns are strong (with a Young’s modulus that is greater than 29 GPa), have a high electrical conductivity of around 2500 S/m and a very large surface area – about 2600 m2/g for graphene oxide and 2210 m2/g for the reduced material.

That high capacitance means that the yarns may be useful in supercapacitors, and the researchers also envision using them in powerful next-generation multifunctional renewable wearable energy storage systems.

This is not the first research into graphene based fibers of course. In 2011, Chinese researchers demonstrated meter long fibers made from graphene oxide flakes. In July 2013, Rice University researchers developed a new strong fiber material made from large graphene oxide flakes. Those fiber exhibited 100% knot efficiency. A few months later, Korean scientists developed a method to make conductive, flexible, and durable textiles (fabrics) wrapped with reduced graphene oxide.