Thursday, May 01, 2014: Looks like researchers have taken the first step towards creating bendable and fully foldable mobile phones and other similar devices that can be rolled and carried according to one’s needs and choices. In a bid to create a material that possesses the flexibility of graphene, carbon nanotubes and conducting polymers while having the high electrical storage capacity of inorganic metal compounds at the same time, researchers at the University of Houston have developed a new ‘thin’ film for energy storage.
James Tour and his colleagues have developed gold nanomesh electrodes that offer ultra-high stretchability as well as provide good electrical conductivity at the same time. The ‘flexible’ material essentially consists of nanoporous nickel-fluoride electrodes layered around a solid electrolyte providing battery-like super-capacitor performance. In this way the material is able to provide the best qualities of a high-efficiency battery as well as a high-powered super-capacitor while bidding adieu to Lithium used traditionally in commercial batteries.
“Compared with a lithium-ion device, the structure is quite simple and safe,” Yang Yang, co-lead author of the research paper was quoted as saying. “It behaves like a battery but the structure is that of a super-capacitor. If we use it as a super-capacitor, we can charge quickly at a high current rate and discharge it in a very short time. But for other applications, we find we can set it up to charge more slowly and to discharge slowly like a battery,” said lead author James Tour. While the electrochemical capacitor is just a hundredth of an inch thick, the researchers claim that it’s possible to scale up the material as desired either by increasing the size or through the addition of layers. The researchers have found that the material was able to hold 76 per cent of its capacity over 10,000 charge-discharge cycles and 1,000 bending cycles.
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