Researchers develop a new design of the electrode, whereby to charge the batteries will be in seconds instead of hours.
According to scientists, this can solve not only the problem forever discharging smartphones, but also to solve one of the main challenges hindering the market development of electric vehicles.
Previous studies allowed the use of supercapacitors as energy storage for portable electronics. Supercapacitors release energy in large volumes, and have incredible potential. The problem is that you can only use them for the quick cycles of charge/discharge, and not for long-term storage of energy. Now a team of scientists from Drexel University have combined the properties of supercapacitors and traditional batteries with high capacity using a material called MXene.
“The results of our study completely refute the generally accepted dogma, that the chemical charge the devices used in batteries is always much slower than physical memory used in an electric double-layer capacitors also known as supercapacitors. We can charge the MXene electrodes in the tens of milliseconds. This is possible due to the very high electronic conductivity of the material. This opens up the possibility for the development of ultrafast energy storage devices that can be charged for a few seconds, but their capacity will be significantly higher than conventional supercapacitors,” said the study’s lead author Yury Gogotsi.
MXene is a flat nanomaterial that looks like a sandwich consisting of oxide on the edges and the conductive carbon and metal parts as “stuffing”. The MXene layers superimposed on top of each other. This structure creates a barrier for ions, chemical carriers, allowing you to keep it.
It should be noted that although the work looks promising, it is unclear whether it would be possible to create such material battery for electric vehicle, as long as all the tests were carried out on very small batteries.
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