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Last
year, researchers at UCLA made a rather fantastic, if serendipitous, discovery.
A team of scientists led by chemist Richard Kaner had
just finished devising an efficient method for producing high-quality sheets of
the Nobel-prize winning supermaterial known as graphene... with a
consumer-grade DVD drive. That was groundbreaking in and of itself, but the
real surprise came when Maher El-Kady, a researcher in Kaner's lab, wired a
small square of their high quality carbon sheets up to a lightbulb. Then
something incredible happened.
As the video above
explains, Kaner and El-Kady had stumbled upon an energy storage medium with
revolutionary potential. Imagine filling your smart phone with a long-lasting
charge in just a couple seconds, or an electric car in a minute. Future
applications, first described in a March 2012 issue of Science,
looked very promising.
Fast forward one year, and
Kaner and El-Kady are even closer to realizing a tomorrow rich with
supercapacitor technology. In a paper published in a recent issue of Nature Communications,
the researchers report that El-Kady's original fabrication process (highlighted
in the video) can be made even more efficient. More efficient production of
high quality graphene means it's scalable. And scalability, of course, can lead
to manufacturing and wide-scale technological implementation. As the researchers note in the abstract to their paper:
Here we demonstrate a scalable fabrication of graphene
micro-supercapacitors over large areas by direct laser writing on graphite
oxide films using a standard LightScribe DVD burner. More than 100
micro-supercapacitors can be produced on a single disc in 30 min or less...
These micro-supercapacitors demonstrate a power density of ~200 W cm−3, which
is among the highest values achieved for any supercapacitor.
The upshot? The
supercapacitors that Kaner and El-Kady are producing with freaking DVD burners could find their way into consumer
tech way sooner than many might have originally guessed. (While minute-charge
electric cars may still be a ways off, the fact these sheets are as unobtrusive
and flexible as they are bodes well for their incorporation into plenty of
near-future technologies — roll-up displays, for instance, or e-paper.)
According to Kaner, his lab is already courting partners in industry. Color us
excited.
The above video, by Brian Golden Davis,
is a is a Finalist in the GE FOCUS FORWARDFilmmaker Competition. Read the papers from the Kaner
lab in Science and Nature Communications.
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