Dip Ordinary Paper Into Ink Infused With Nanotubes and Nanowires to Create an Instant Battery

Stanford scientists are harnessing nanotechnology to quickly produce ultra-lightweight, bendable batteries and supercapacitors in the form of everyday paper.

Simply coating a sheet of paper with ink made of carbon nanotubes and silver nanowires makes a highly conductive storage device, said Yi Cui, assistant professor of materials science and engineering.

“Society really needs a low-cost, high-performance energy storage device, such as batteries and simple supercapacitors,” he said.

Like batteries, capacitors hold an electric charge, but for a shorter period of time. However, capacitors can store and discharge electricity much more rapidly than a battery.

Cui’s work is reported in the paper “Highly Conductive Paper for Energy Storage Devices,” published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“These nanomaterials are special,” Cui said. “They’re a one-dimensional structure with very small diameters.” The small diameter helps the nanomaterial ink stick strongly to the fibrous paper, making the battery and supercapacitor very durable. The paper supercapacitor may last through 40,000 charge-discharge cycles — at least an order of magnitude more than lithium batteries. The nanomaterials also make ideal conductors because they move electricity along much more efficiently than ordinary conductors, Cui said.

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Tags: bendable batteries, carbon nano tube, carbon nanotubes, energy storage device, energy storage devices, hybrid cars, instant battery, lithium batteries, nanomaterials, nanowires, performance energy, stanford scientists, supercapacitors, ultracapacitors

This entry was posted on Sunday, December 13th, 2009 at 1:15 pm and is filed under Consider This, Cutting-edge Research, Innovation, Innovation Needed, Nanotech, Project Energy, Science Digest / Science Daily, disruptive innovation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.