Designer Carbon can boost battery and supercapacitor performance - Stanford University

Researchers at the Stanford University have developed a new type of carbon material that can enable unprecedented performance in the traditional lithium sulphur batteries and supercapacitors. This new 'designer carbon' is controllable and versatile as well because researchers can control its chemical composition, pore size and even the surface area. Zhenan Bao, the senior author of the paper published in #-Link-Snipped-# journal, said that this material has exceptional energy-storage capacity that can boost the performance of traditional batteries.

The designer carbon is an improvement over the activated carbon - an inexpensive material, typically used in products like water filters, air deodorizers and even in energy storage devices. This cheap activated carbon is typically made from coconut shells by burning the coconut at very high temperature and then using chemicals to process it.

The aim of the activation process is to create nano-sized holes to increase the surface area of carbon. This allows it to catalyze the chemical reactions and store more electric charge.

The activated carbon has drawbacks too. The limited interconnectivity between these nano-sized holes puts check on its ability to transport charge. Also, there is no known way to control the connectivity between these pores.


Stanford researchers used new technique to synthesize carbon using chemicals and polymers. The hydrogen polymers can form interconnected, 3D network for conducting electric charge. The research team used mild carbonization and activation process to convert these 3D networks into carbon sheets just about a nanometer thick. The result is a 'designer carbon' that can be tweaked and tuned for various applications.

Researchers studied the application of the designer carbon in supercapacitors and lithium sulphur batteries. The electrical conductivity of the supercapacitor improved by about three times and the lithium sulphur showed increased performance.

The details of the research are available on the source link.

Source: #-Link-Snipped-#