Stanford researchers, working with scientists at Korea’s Ulsan National Institute of Science and Technology (UNIST) and China’s National Laboratory of Microstructures (Nanjing), School of Electronic Science and Engineering, at Nanjing University, have squeezed carbon as flat (if not flatter than) as graphene and poked lots of well-sized holes in it to make designer battery and supercapacitor components. Professor Zhenan Bao led the efforts at Stanford. The combined teams’ paper, “Ultrahigh Surface Area Three-Dimensional Porous Graphitic Carbon from Conjugated Polymeric Molecular Framework,” appeared as a cover article in the May 18 edition of the journal ACS Central Science. The paper explains, “High surface area porous carbon materials are of great technological importance due to their diverse functionalities and excellent physical/chemical robustness. Their high electronic conductivity, large surface area, and good chemical and electrochemical stability are of particular interest for electrochemical energy storage devices, such as electrochemical capacitors (or supercapacitors) and batteries.” High surface area gives more space for electrolyte to interact with …
Batteries That Heal Themselves
Alert reader Colin Rush provided this breaking development in battery science. Regular readers will remember Dr. Yi Cui’s name. He’s a Stanford University scientist who has worked with paper batteries, much more powerful electrodes, and means of helping batteries stay together under the continuous strain of expanding and contracting during charging and discharging. He explained that at the third annual Electric Aircraft Symposium at the Hiller Aviation Museum, and has since adopted several tactics to overcome that problem. One commercial outgrowth of his work, Amprius, is working on commercial production that benefits from his insights. Since that internal flexing eventually leads to cracking of electrodes, Dr. Cui’s latest announcement brings some hope that such things can not only be overcome, but literally healed. Just as our bodies have internal resources to fight diseases and repair muscle and bone, batteries can be made to be self-healing. Dr. Cui has been a proponent of using silicon as a major component in electrodes, …