Saturday, February 15, 2025

Plastic Supercapacitors Could Fix Energy Storage

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Imagine a breakthrough that makes energy storage faster, more efficient, and longer-lasting—could this change the future of renewable energy? Discover more!

Illustration of a PEDOT film on a graphene sheet that can be used in supercapacitors to store large amounts of energy. Credit: Maher El-Kady
Illustration of a PEDOT film on a graphene sheet that can be used in supercapacitors to store large amounts of energy. Credit: Maher El-Kady

Researchers at the University of California, Los Angeles, have found a way to transform a flat sheet of graphene into a three-dimensional structure resembling Astroturf, creating plastic supercapacitors.

Unlike batteries, which store energy through slow chemical reactions, supercapacitors store and release energy by accumulating electrical charge on their surface. This enables them to charge and discharge quickly, making them suitable for applications that need rapid power bursts, like regenerative braking in hybrid and electric vehicles and camera flashes. Improved supercapacitors could help reduce dependence on fossil fuels.

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The UCLA researchers have created the new material using a vapour-phase growth process to form vertical PEDOT nanofibers. These nanofibers increase the material’s surface area, enabling it to store more energy. By adding a drop of liquid containing graphene oxide nanoflakes and ferric chloride onto a graphite sheet, the researchers exposed the sample to a vapour of precursor molecules forming the PEDOT polymer. Instead of creating a thin, flat film, the polymer grew into a thick structure, enhancing the surface area compared to traditional PEDOT materials.

The authors used these PEDOT structures to create supercapacitors with high charge storage capacity and cycling stability, lasting nearly 100,000 cycles. This advancement could lead to more efficient energy storage systems, addressing challenges in renewable energy and sustainability.

The new PEDOT material has exceeded expectations in key areas. Its conductivity is 100 times higher than commercial PEDOT products, making it more efficient for charge storage. These PEDOT nanofibers’ electrochemically active surface area is four times greater than traditional PEDOT. This increased surface area allows more energy to be stored in the same volume, improving supercapacitor performance.

The new process, which grows a thick layer of nanofibers on the graphene sheet, gives this material one of the highest charge storage capacities for PEDOT, surpassing 4,600 milliFarads per square centimetre—almost ten times higher than conventional PEDOT.

Additionally, the material is durable, lasting over 70,000 charging cycles, outlasting traditional materials. These improvements enable faster, more efficient, and longer-lasting supercapacitors, making them crucial for the renewable energy industry.

Reference: Musibau Francis Jimoh et al, Direct Fabrication of 3D Electrodes Based on Graphene and Conducting Polymers for Supercapacitor Applications, Advanced Functional Materials (2024). DOI: 10.1002/adfm.202405569

Nidhi Agarwal
Nidhi Agarwal
Nidhi Agarwal is a Senior Technology Journalist at EFY with a deep interest in embedded systems, development boards and IoT cloud solutions.

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