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Graphene Supercapacitors: Charging Up the Future

Abstract

Batteries run just about everything portable in our lives such as smartphones, tablets, computers, etc. While we have become accustomed to the rapid improvement of portable electronics, the slow development of batteries is holding back technological progress. Thus, it is imperative to develop a new energy storage technology providing devices that are compact, reliable, and energy dense, charge quickly, and possess both long cycle life and calendar life. Using a consumer grade LightScribe DVD burner, we have developed graphene supercapacitors with high charge storage capacity while providing 20 times more power than supercapacitors currently available. Interestingly, this direct writing technique offers a way to pattern graphene precisely without using masks or cleanroom operations, thus giving the flexibility to produce supercapacitors in various sizes and architectures at low cost. The miniaturization of the electrodes to the microscale results in enhanced charge storage capacity and rate capability. In addition, by combining graphene with conducting polymers and metal oxides, this work demonstrates pseudo-capacitors and hybrid supercapacitors with enhanced charge storage capacities that rival those of thin film batteries, while they can be recharged in less than a second. Great efforts are currently in progress between UCLA and Maxwell Technologies to move this technology from the laboratory to the industrial scale. In addition, this work describes several other applications that take advantage of the fascinating properties of graphene including lithium ion batteries and micro-batteries, sensors and catalysis.

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