Juice

Tech finds a way. Packing the Ions presages a new way to store energy and release it in ways thought to be impossible until now...

Gogotsi's team discovered you can increase the energy stored in a carbon supercapacitor dramatically by shrinking pores in the material to a seemingly impossible size—seemingly impossible because the pores were smaller than the solvent-covered electric charge-carriers that were supposed to fit within them. The team published its findings in the journal Science.


The mystery was not simply academic. Capacitors are an important technology that provides energy by holding an electrical charge. They have several advantages over traditional batteries—charging and discharging nearly instantaneously and recharging over and over again, almost indefinitely, without wearing out—but they also have drawbacks—most importantly, they hold far less energy.


An electric double-layer capacitor, or supercapacitor, represents an advance on the technology that allows for far greater energy density. While in traditional capacitors two metallic plates are separated by a nonconducting material known as a dielectric, in a supercapacitor an electrolyte is able to form an electric double layer with electrode materials that have very high surface areas.


As such, supercapacitors are able to achieve the same effect within a single material, as properties of the material divide it into separate layers with a very thin, nonconducting boundary. Because they can both forgo a bulky dielectric layer and make use of the carbon's nanoscale pores, supercapacitors are able to store far more energy than their traditional counterparts in a given volume. This technology could help increase the value of energy sources that are clean, but sporadic, meting out stored energy during downtimes such as night for a solar cell or calm days for a wind turbine.

In effect..."It uses graphene on a substrate and a polymer-gel electrolyte," Sumpter explained, "so that you produce a device that is fully transparent and flexible. You can wrap it around your finger, but it's still an energy storage device. So we've gone all the way from modeling electrons to making a functional device that you can hold in your hand."


Localized fabbing and energy production via flexible high efficiency/cheap solar combined with artificial photosynthesis (and storing this energy using this kind of tech) is key to moving civilization into a sustainable economy environment because the status quo is no longer viable even though the powers at be are trying keep the old bus going while the tires begin to fall off and the engine ceases to run. To see why staying the course is crazy, check out the world's debt and the state of the crumbling Eurozone to see, in part, why.


“Our senses enable us to perceive only a minute portion of the outside world.” - Nikola Tesla