A Plasmon-Driven Transparent and Flexible Microsupercapacitor for Dual Solar-Hydrovoltaic Energy Harvesting

In emerging technologies such as smartphones and smart windows, flexible and transparent miniaturized energy storage systems are essential, yet existing devices often fail for practical applications. To address this, a plasmon-assisted strategy is employed to enhance microsupercapacitor (MSC) performance by incorporating silver nanowires into a ZnO-based transparent device on a flexible polydimethylsiloxane (PDMS) substrate. The MSC exhibits outstanding electrochemical performance, achieving a volumetric capacitance of 996.73 F cm^–3, an energy density of 138.43 mWh cm^–3, and a power density of 1.74 W cm^–3 under combined plasmonic excitation and photoirradiation, ∼50% enhancement relative to the dark condition. The silver nanowires act as plasmonic hot spots that promote redox activity through plasma induced resonance energy transfer (PIRET), which is also confirmed by finite-difference time-domain (FDTD) simulations. The platform harvests sunlight and hydrovoltaic energy to power an LED for 90 s, demonstrating potential for next-generation flexible, transparent microscale energy storage systems.