A future in which our electrical gadgets are no longer limited by plugs and external power sources may be closer.
This intriguing prospect is one of the reasons for the interest in building the capacity to store electrical energy directly into a wide range of products, such as a laptop whose casing serves as its battery, or an electric car powered by energy stored in its chassis, or a home where the dry wall store the electricity that runs the lights and appliances.
The small, dull grey wafer cells that graduate student Andrew Westover and assistant professor of mechanical engineering Cary Pint from Vanderbilt University have made can store and discharge significant amounts of electricity.
“All of a sudden, the ability to design technologies at the basis of health, entertainment, travel and social communication will not be limited by plugs and external power sources,” Pint said.
The new device is a supercapacitor that stores electricity by assembling electrically charged ions on the surface of a porous material, instead of storing it in chemical reactions the way batteries do. As a result, supercaps can charge and discharge in minutes, instead of hours, and operate for millions of cycles, instead of thousands of cycles like batteries.
