In a groundbreaking chemistry study, researchers have announced achieving the highest level of energy storage, or capacitance, ever recorded in a supercapacitor.
Led by Luis Echegoyen, Ph.D., professor emeritus at The University of Texas at El Paso, and Marta Plonska-Brzezinska, Ph.D., of the Medical University of Bialystok, Poland, the study was recently featured in the journal Scientific Reports, published by Nature Portfolios.
Supercapacitors are devices that store electrical energy between two closely spaced metal plates, separated by a non-conductive surface. Unlike batteries, which rely on chemical transformations, supercapacitors store energy using oppositely charged surfaces. They are commonly used in applications that require rapid energy discharge, such as electric cars, buses, trains, and cranes.
“This is a significant advancement that brings us closer to achieving supercapacitors with high energy density, which would revolutionize energy storage and management,” said Echegoyen, a longstanding faculty member of UTEP’s Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry.
Supercapacitors offer great potential due to their ability to charge much faster than batteries, often within seconds or fractions of a second, according to Echegoyen. However, their current limitation is the low amount of energy they can store, restricting their range of applications. Scientists believe that if supercapacitors could store more energy, they would weigh less and charge faster than batteries, resulting in significant commercial impact.
Echegoyen and Plonska-Brzezinska’s new supercapacitor, designed with a carbon “nano-onion” core structure, achieved a record-breaking level of storage, or capacitance. This structure creates multiple pores that enable the storage of a larger volume of energy.