Supercapacitors are Expected to Reduce Costs, and Lithium Batteries Will Be Replaced

Supercapacitor is a new type of energy storage device with performance between physical capacitor and secondary battery.

electric vehicle image

In addition, supercapacitors have the characteristics of high efficiency, long cycle life and so on. The future will be widely used in the fields of electric vehicle, information communication, aerospace and military industry.

The electric car industry leader Tesla CEO musk believes that lithium will soon become obsolete, the super capacitor in the future will become the main energy equipment of automobile. The super capacitor can be used not only to meet the requirements of the automobile in the starting, acceleration, climbing high power, with the increase of capacity, its advantages will be fully over lithium, more importantly, the car charging time will no longer take too long, perhaps in a few minutes to complete a car charging.

At present, the most advanced countries of supercapacitor technology are the United States, Japan and Russia, and China has made great achievements in this respect. The supercapacitor is mainly composed of a collector electrode, electrolyte and separator and other components, wherein the electrode material is a key factor affecting the performance of the supercapacitor electrode material and production costs, the development of high performance and low cost is the main contents of the research work of the supercapacitor. At present, the main directions of supercapacitors in China are graphene and carbon nanotubes.

On July 18, 2017, researchers at the University of Washington in the United States developed a system for making electrodes for supercapacitors that is faster and cheaper than conventional methods. The key to this technique is the incorporation of nano-tungsten disulfide in carbon electrodes. 

It is understood that, in order to obtain a high surface area of high efficiency electrode, the team used airgel solution. Airgel solutions are among the most promising electrode fabrication solutions in the field of supercapacitors. The main material of aerogels is carbon. The carbon gel has the characteristics of good conductivity, large specific surface area and wide range of density. It is the ideal electrode material for the preparation of double layer capacitor, but the defects of carbon aerogels are expensive raw materials, complex preparation process, long production cycle, scale of production is difficult, can only exist in the laboratory program. 

In order to improve the performance of carbon aerogels, the synthesis process is cheaper and easier. Researchers try to add graphene in the carbon gel electrode, but unfortunately there is no effect of graphene, so use tungsten disulfide, the effect actually unexpectedly good.

tungsten disulfide battery image

The researchers treated the tungsten disulfide with high-frequency sound waves, broken it down into thin pieces and incorporated it into a carbon-rich gel matrix. Tungsten disulfide synthesizes a full load of wet gel in less than two hours, while other materials require many days. Tests on batteries showed that adding tungsten disulfide increased electrode capacitance by at least 127% over carbon alone and, of course, most importantly, the entire manufacturing process took hours.

In addition, the researchers found that carbon airgel compounded with tungsten disulfide remained stable enough to catalyze hydrogen production, not only did not affect the structure of the airgel, but also showed good cyclic stability, there was no loss of capacitance in 2000 cycles, indicating that the life of this electrode would be very long.

In industrial applications, time is money "when you need a few weeks to complete the process is shortened to a few hours, the cost savings will be considerable, the researchers believe that their results greatly promote the development of the super capacitor, paving the way for the large-scale production of super capacitor, in the next few days, just by fine-tuning the research results, you can begin to promote.

 

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