CHANNELS

Aerospace

Automotive

Automated & Autonomous Vehicles

Battery & Electrification Technology

Defense

Drone TV

Electronics

Manufacturing & Prototyping

Materials

Medical

Motion Control

RF & Microwave Technology

Robotics & Automation

Sensors & IoT

Test & Measurement

Aerospace
Automotive
Automated & Autonomous Vehicles
Battery & Electrification Technology
Defense
Drone TV
Electronics
Manufacturing & Prototyping
Materials
Medical
Motion Control
RF & Microwave Technology
Robotics & Automation
Sensors & IoT
Test & Measurement
Aerospace & Defense
Search Results

Laser-Induced Graphene Makes Powerful Energy Storage Possible

Rice University researchers who previously pioneered the development of laser-induced graphene have configured their discovery into flexible, solid-state microsupercapacitors that rival the best available for energy storage and delivery. Microsupercapacitors are not batteries, but inch closer to them as the technology improves. Traditional capacitors store energy and release it quickly, unlike common lithium-ion batteries that take a long time to charge and release their energy as needed. Rice's microsupercapacitors charge 50 times faster than batteries, discharge more slowly than traditional capacitors, and match commercial supercapacitors for both the amount of energy stored and power delivered.

Topics:
Batteries Electronics & Computers Energy Energy Storage Lasers & Laser Systems Materials Photonics Power

More From SAE Media Group

    Transcript

    00:00:00 [Music] so what we are doing with the universal laser system is that we are turning a commercial avoidable polymer fume into highly graphitized graphine structures we've got the ability to draw now graphine on plastic generally graphine needs chemical vapor dep deposition so it's a very high temperature it's in an inert atmosphere and you have to keep it

    00:00:31 away from air moisture everything now we just do this in air writing it on commercial plastic films and wherever the laser hits you form graphine on the surface once you make these little arrays then you just put a little overcoat and electrodes and you get super capacitors super capacitors are like batteries but they have much higher power than batteries and so what we're

    00:00:54 doing is we're moving toward flexible electronics that will allow these to flex and be made in air so what we do is we just take a a commercial laser system like this Universal laser system and we use it to write patterns on this commercial plastic film and then we just encapsulate it and these are now energy storage systems that can store energy and give the energy back just like a

    00:01:20 battery would do but with a much higher power and that's what we're moving toward and also toward flexible Electronics where we can take these and have them flexing when we're moving we can put them in shoes we can put them in clothing because they're entirely flexible that's the idea to be able to build structures very rapidly roll to roll so just as newspaper print goes

    00:01:42 from one roll to another and the ink is is written on it this is what we would do we would have roll to- roll plastic films going and lasers would just print the patterns that would then be used in electronics but it's not just directly in this way we can take these we can also electrochemically coat them and make pseudo capacitors which have even much higher energy than than this the

    00:02:05 super capacitors would have so we can move this into other domains in other ways what we can do is we can write patterns and then scrape off the graphine and use that graphine in other catalytic reactions for example we have shown that we can use it to split water this is taking water H2O and converting it to H2 and oxygen so it's splitting water and then we can take that hydrogen

    00:02:28 that H2 mix it with oxygen from the air and use that in a fuel cell for these renewable energy packages this is what we've been able to create here