Scientists from the US have built a supercapacitor with one and two-dimensional materials that may one day revolutionise the personal electronic equipment and electric vehicle markets.
The team from the University of Central Florida’s (UCF) NanoScience Technology Center claim their battery can be recharged 30,000 times without degrading.
But that is still around 970,000 cycles less than claims made by supercapacitor firms such as Skeleton Technologies and Maxwell Technologies, although the UCF team do admit their product is still some way from being ready for commercialistion.
The supercapacitor built by UCF integrates an array of one-dimensional (1D) nanowires with conformal 2D transition-metal dichalcogenides (2D TMDs) layers to make the supercapacitor.
2D TMDs are considered a promising capacitive material for supercapacitor devices due to their intrinsically layered structure and large surface areas.
In this case, the scientists overcome issues like limited cyclic stabilities and capacitance loss due to the poor structural integrity at the interfaces of randomly assembled materials.
The 1D and 2D supercapacitor components possess ‘one-body’ geometry with atomically sharp and structurally robust core/shell interfaces, as they were spontaneously converted from identical metal current collectors via sequential oxidation/sulfurisation.
Nitin Choudhary, a postdoctoral associate who conducted much of the research said: “For small electronic devices, our materials are surpassing the conventional ones worldwide in terms of energy density, power density and cyclic stability.”
The finding was published in the academic journal ACS Nano.
The team believes their new supercapacitor would make phones, electronic gadgets, electric vehicles, and even wearable devices better.
The university’s Office of Technology Transfer is working to patent the new process.
