The Demand for Efficient Energy Storage
As renewable energy sources continue to grow, there is a pressing need for more effective, efficient electrical energy storage with high capacity and low cost. All over the world, researchers are pursuing this important goal.
A Major Supercapacitor Improvement
Chemists at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory developed a carbonaceous supercapacitor substance that stores 4X more energy than currently available in other supercapacitors. A supercapacitor made with this material could store more electrical energy, with potential applications in regenerative brakes, electronics and power supplies.
A capacitor is an electronic device that stores electrical energy in an electric field by accumulating electric charges. A supercapacitor is a high-capacity capacitor, with a capacitance value much higher than solid-state capacitors but with typically lower voltage limits, and typically stores up to 100 times more energy for its size than ordinary capacitors.
Highly Porous Carbon
The team has created a carbon material with enhanced properties that pushed the previous limits of energy storage for carbon supercapacitors to another level. Using machine-learning, they found an oxygen-rich highly porous carbon active materials for supercapacitors, and published their findings in Nature Communications. "This is the highest recorded storage capacitance for porous carbon," said Dai, who created and designed the experiments with Wang. "This is a real milestone."
As research continues, you can expect more breakthroughs in energy storage.
For more details, read the article at PHYS.ORG.
