New polymers could lead to ultra-high density supercapacitors Thursday, 08 December 2016

Teams from the University of Surrey, the University of Bristol, and Augmented Optics have discovered new materials that offer an alternative to battery power, and are between 1000 to 10,000 times more powerful than the current battery alternative, supercapacitors.

The new polymers are tough, flexible conducting materials that are based on large organic molecules composed of many repeated sub-units and bonded together to form a three-dimensional network.

Supercapacitors, an alternative power source to batteries, store energy using electrodes and electrolytes and both charge and deliver energy quickly. Conventional batteries, in contrast, charge and deliver energy much more slowly. Supercapacitors can charge and discharge rapidly over very large numbers of cycles, but have poor energy density per kilogram, approximately just one twentieth of existing battery technology. Due to this low energy density, they have been unable to compete with conventional battery energy storage in many applications.

The new polymers could be used to create supercapacitors with extremely high energy density, offering safer, faster charging, more efficient and more ecologically friendly alternatives to current batteries and supercapacitors.

The program was conducted by teams at the University of Surrey’s Department of Chemistry where the project was initiated by Dr Donald Highgate of Augmented Optics. The research team was co-led by the Principal Investigators Dr Ian Hamerton and Dr Brendan Howlin.

According to the researchers, new supercapacitors created with these polymers, if integrated into electric vehicles, may allow them to travel similar distances as petrol cars without the need to stop for lengthy re-charging breaks. While currently electric cars take between six to eight hours to recharge, electric cars using the new power technology could recharge fully in the time it takes to fill a regular car with petrol.

For example, supercapacitor buses, which are already in use in countries like China, currently have a very limited range, requiring recharging every two to three stops. With this new technology in place, buses would only need to recharge every 20 to 30 stops, and recharges will only take a few seconds.

The new ultra-capacitor supercapacitors could also make it possible to recharge mobile phones, laptops or other mobile devices in just a few seconds.

Other potential applications for the new power technology include transport, aerospace, energy generation and household applications.

The technology was adapted from the principles used to make soft contact lenses, which Dr Donald Highgate from Augmented Optics developed following his postgraduate studies at the University of Surrey 40 years ago.

Dr Hamerton from the University of Bristol noted that while the research has potentially opened the route to very high density supercapacitors, the newly developed polymers have many other possible uses including bioelectronics, sensors, wearable electronics, and advanced optics.