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A report from a team of scientists from the University of Central Florida (UCF) tells of how they have developed a new process for creating flexible supercapacitors that can store more energy and be recharged more than 30,000 times without degrading.
Scientists have been studying the use of nanomaterials to improve supercapacitors that could enhance or even replace batteries in electronic devices. It's a stubborn problem, because a supercapacitor that held as much energy as a lithium-ion battery would have to be much, much larger. The team at UCF has experimented with applying newly discovered two-dimensional materials only a few atoms thick to supercapacitors.
[...] [The] team has developed supercapacitors composed of millions of nanometer-thick wires coated with shells of two-dimensional materials. A highly conductive core facilitates fast electron transfer for fast charging and discharging. And uniformly coated shells of two-dimensional materials yield high energy and power densities.
[...] Supercapacitors that use the new materials could be used in phones and other electronic gadgets, and electric vehicles that could benefit from sudden bursts of power and speed. And because they're flexible, it could mean a significant advancement in wearable tech, as well.
Although not yet commercially ready, the team has been working with UCF's Office of Technology Transfer to patent the new process.
The full journal article in ACS Nano is paywalled but the abstract is available,
(Score: 2) by richtopia on Wednesday November 23 2016, @09:18PM
I used to have three batteries for my phone, so in about 30 seconds I could be fully powered again.
Snarkyness aside, this tech does look really cool. High current applications are the domain of super-caps typically, for example a bus stopping generates a lot of energy fast. Full electric vehicles often have enough cells in parallel to handle that type of current, but hybrids with their small batteries cannot store a lot of energy quickly.