The common battery may not keep going and going and going after all. A recent scientific advance—the first successfully 3-D printed supercapacitors using an ultralightweight graphene aerogel—could lead to the end of the ubiquitous power source. The breakthrough also could allow greater flexibility in the design of electronics and provide the juice for high-powered military systems.
Batteries power everything from iPhones to Tesla automobiles to a wide range of tactical equipment necessary for winning wars. They also get shipped by the tons to combat theaters, take up space in tactical vehicles and are carried across the battlefield on the backs of warfighters who often are already overloaded with equipment.
By comparison, supercapacitors store vast amounts of energy. Commercially available supercapacitors recover braking energy in cars, buses and trains and open the emergency exits of the Airbus A380. Supercapacitors can charge incredibly quickly, potentially requiring just minutes or seconds to reach full capacity, points out Cheng Zhu, a Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) engineer and the lead author of a paper published earlier this year in the journal Nano Letters. Lab researchers worked closely with University of California Santa Cruz associate professor Yat Li and graduate student Tianyu Liu, who performed the electrochemical characterizations and optimized the materials used in the process.
To read more, click here.