At this point, the polymer absorbed oxygen and generated insulating materials, which isolated the defective portion from the remainder of the capacitor. Despite the loss of some effective capacitance, the self-healing process had a negligible impact on the overall performance, while substantially reducing the LC [40, 41].
PVA-PANI hydrogel prepared under appropriate conditions is suitable for flexible capacitor [20], [21]. Accordingly, conductive bicomponent hydrogel have been considered as promising candidates for flexible electronic devices.
Capacitors made of metallized polypropylene films suffer partial discharges, called self-healing, due to weak electrical defects. Those defects are destroyed by an electrical arc that extinguishes when enough metal of the electrodes is vapourized around this point.
The electrochemical properties of the PPG as a flexible and self-healing solid-state capacitor were investigated through cyclic voltammetry (CV), galvanostatic charge–discharge (GCD) and electrochemical impedance spectroscopy (EIS).
During self-clearing of metallized film capacitors, there is a gradual decrease of capacitance as a result of an increasing number of self-clearing events, which eventually leads to catastrophic breakdown of the capacitor; for example, see Figure 4 B.
The capacitor can automatically heal for mechanical damage because PPG possesses self-healing performance. The capacitor was cut off, then was brought into together and examined immediately. As demonstrated in Fig. 5 d-5e, both CV and GCD curves of the healed capacitor were collected and evaluated.