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

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. An overview of self‐healing materials for next‐generation energy harvesting and storage devices is presented. Self‐healing mechanisms and different self‐healing materials including insulators, electrical conductors, ionic conductors, and semiconductors are introduced. The fabrications of various self‐healing energy harvesting and storage devices are also described. The existing challenges and promising solutions of the field are discussed.