Self-Healing Materials for Next-Generation Energy Harvesting and Storage Devices

KGaA, Weinheim. Because of the great breakthroughs of self-healing materials in the past decade, endowing devices with self-healing ability has emerged as a particularly promising route to effectively enhance the device durability and functionality. This article summarizes recent advances in self-healing materials developed for energy harvesting and storage devices (e.g., nanogenerators, solar cells, supercapacitors, and lithium-ion batteries) over the past decade. This review first introduces the main self-healing mechanisms among different materials including insulators, electrical conductors, semiconductors, and ionic conductors. Then, the basic concepts, fabrication techniques, and healing performances of the newly developed self-healing energy harvesting (nanogenerators and solar cells) and storage (supercapacitors and lithium-ion batteries) devices are described in detail. Finally, the existing challenges and promising solutions of self-healing materials and devices are discussed.