The Super Supercapacitor | Brian Golden Davis from Focus Forward Films on Vimeo.

Ric Kaner set out to find a new way to make graphene, the thinnest and strongest material on earth. What he found was a new way to power the world.

Source: http://io9.com/5987086/meet-the-scientific-accident-that-could-change-the-world

Last year, researchers at UCLA made a rather fantastic, if serendipitous, discovery. A team of scientists led by chemist Richard Kaner had just finished devising an efficient method for producing high-quality sheets of the Nobel-prize winning supermaterial known as graphene — with a consumer-grade DVD drive. That was groundbreaking in and of itself, but the real surprise came when Maher El-Kady, a researcher in Kaner's lab, wired a small square of their high quality carbon sheets up to a lightbulb. Then something incredible happened.

As the video above explains, Kaner and El-Kady had stumbled upon an energy storage medium with revolutionary potential. Imagine filling your smart phone with a long-lasting charge in just a couple seconds, or an electric car in a minute. Future applications, first described in a March 2012 issue of Science, looked very promising.

Fast forward one year, and Kaner and El-Kady are even closer to realizing a tomorrow rich with supercapacitor technology. In a paper published in a recent issue of Nature Communications, the researchers report that El-Kady's original fabrication process (highlighted in the video) can be made even more efficient. More efficient production of high quality graphene means it's scalable. And scalability, of course, can lead to manufacturing and wide-scale technological implementation. As the researchers note in the abstract to their paper [emphasis added]:

Here we demonstrate a scalable fabrication of graphene micro-supercapacitors over large areas by direct laser writing on graphite oxide films using a standard LightScribe DVD burner. More than 100 micro-supercapacitors can be produced on a single disc in 30 min or less... These micro-supercapacitors demonstrate a power density of ~200 W cm−3, which is among the highest values achieved for any supercapacitor.

The upshot? The supercapacitors that Kanery and El-Kady are producing with freaking DVD burners could find their way into consumer tech way sooner than many might have originally guessed. (While minute-charge electric cars may still be a ways off, the fact these sheets are as unobtrusive and flexible as they are bodes well for their incorporation into near-future technologies like roll-up displays and e-paper.) According to Kaner, his lab is already courting partners in industry. Color us excited.

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Comments

  • The coolest thing about this tech is the possibilities for creating multi-function structures: the airframe is the battery and the power distribution circuits, with X-Aerogel providing insulation and shear core structure.

  • True... But... They could make really compact launch catapults possible - gauss-gun-principle... :D

    Not to mention the possible medical applications - pocket sized defib for reasonably little money.

  • It should also be mentioned that these little suckers could be seriously dangerous.

    They are probably capable of releasing all of their stored energy in a short fraction of a second.

    One the size of a D Cell could be seriously and explosively lethal. 

  • Actually, Luke, it seems to me that the potential energy density is enormous.

    The whole point of graphene is molecular thickness construction.

    If you can achieve that with the insulating layer as well (the easy part) then massive energy density should be possible.

    I suspect that the materials and architecture will impose significant charge / discharge rate limits though.

  • The energy density is pretty crappy in the big picture. A lot better than traditional capacitors (more than 1,000 times the energy density) but still far from what LiPo batteries offer. So I don't think they'll be used for flying stuff anytime soon. It makes sense for devices like cell phones where chargers are everywhere. I'd take a couple hours of cell phone battery life versus all day battery life if I could charge it completely in a few seconds. The same argument is harder for UAV because the battery life is already so short. Hypothetically speaking I'd rather have ten minutes of flight and half an hour of charge time (with LiPo) than one minute of flight and a few seconds to charge. Hopefully we can get the best of both worlds down the road!

  • No cable, just hold the charging cap close to your bot and the electrons will jump through the air!

    Dark glasses recommended...

  • The charging rate can be whatever you want it to be, so you simply construct the charger to charge at whatever rate is practical (probably not normally 792 amps in any case.) 

  • over a garden hose sized cable?   Not sure what size cable can carry 792A.. but its not the typical battery cable.

  • Charging will be done with a capacitor as well. The charger caps can slowly build their charge while you are flying, and then when it's time to "reload" the onboard caps: it can dump all those built up Watt-hours into your bot.

  • I think a interesting element missing is that since it is a super capacitor you don't have the energy waste in the trying to get the chemical to store the charge.

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