Kaner and El-Kady Explore New Areas of Energy Storage

Dean Sigler Electric Powerplants, Sustainable Aviation Leave a Comment

Now here’s a mission statement.  “Engineering three-dimensional hybrid supercapacitors and microsupercapacitors for high-performance integrated energy storage.” Conventional wisdom says that super and ultracapacitors don’t have the energy storage of batteries, and even given their outstanding ability to deliver power at high levels pretty much instantly, will never be able to run an electric vehicle for extended periods.   So many researchers, with the notable exception of Dr. Richard Kaner and graduate student Maher El-Kady at UCLA have turned their attention to batteries, and not capacitors. They recognize that electronic devices have improved immensely over the past decades, but “the slow pace of battery development has held back technological progress.” Looking to synthesize rather than differentiate, the two California NanoSystems Institute researchers have “successfully combined two nanomaterials to create a new energy storage medium that combines the best qualities of batteries and supercapacitors,” according to their UCLA Newsroom announcement. Their combined components can charge in seconds and be used for “more than …