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Bengaluru: Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder, along with those from Poland and the UK, have devised a way to improve supercapacitors without using batteries— a development that could increase energy storage capacity and potentially change the way we charge electronic devices today.
The findings were published in the peer-reviewed journal PNAS Friday.
Supercapacitors are devices that hold large amounts of energy to discharge in bursts, such as braking mechanisms in vehicles or turning-on devices. As next-generation energy storage devices start to become the norm in industries around the world, researchers have increasingly been delving into their nano- and micro-scales of material structure to understand how to perfect them.
The team of researchers from the US, Poland, and the UK set about trying to understand how to improve supercapacitor energy capacity and experimented with various porous materials for building one. They demonstrated that differences in chemical charges in atoms and ions can cause a flow of electricity, despite a complete lack of chemical reactions, which is what produces power in batteries today.
The researchers, under project head Ankur Gupta, note that this electrolyte transport within such porous materials used to build supercapacitors can be explained using basic electricity laws written by famed physicist Gustav Kirchhoff, which are a staple part of electricity basics studied in school and college. As a consequence, they suggest an addendum that can be applied to porous materials.
This discovery could help develop more efficient energy storage devices that could substantially reduce charging times for everything from laptops to electric vehicles.
“We modified Kirchoff’s Laws for electrolyte transport and suggested that Kirchhoff’s voltage law needs to be modified to include electrochemical potential, and not just electric potential,” Gupta, whose lab is called LIFE — Laboratory of Interfaces, Flow, and Electrokinetcis — told ThePrint.
In their paper, the authors specifically talk about the use of materials that are deemed porous at nanoscales or have nanopores. In such structures, molecules containing ions are unable to latch onto the surface, splitting up into their respective component charges and inducing an electrochemical potential difference that makes electricity flow.
Based on their model of porous materials with large surface areas, the authors conclude that their methodology offers a way to achieve a higher efficiency flow that does not rely on chemical reactions, but works only on the flow of ions. According to the paper, this opens up immediate possibilities for constructing various 3D-printed electrodes and improving supercapacitor performance. Additionally, the team shows that their findings are supported by direct numerical simulations.
