On November 12th, a joint research team led by Professor Park Ho-seok of the Department of Chemical Engineering at Sungkyunkwan University (SKKU) and Professor Yuri Gogotsi at Drexel University has developed a supercapacitor (SC) technology. An SC is an energy storage device, normally known as a bulk storage battery, which can store energy even in the high-frequency (HF) area of kilohertz (kHz). Its specific capacity, the quantity of electric charge stored per unit volume or weight, however, is so low that an SC requires a large volume and weight.
The research team succeeded in developing the new SC technology, whose volume is one-thousandth of other SCs of the past through, using one material called MXene. MXene is a two-dimensional (2D) material that has superb electrical conductivity and fast ion-transport rates. Thus, the research team used the MXene-based electrode materials and the double-networked gel polymer electrolytes (GPEs) of polyvinyl alcohol (PVA) and poly-hydroxyethyl methacrylate (pHEMA) to lower the volume of the SC. By using the characteristics of MXene, the SC material with a superior energy storage function within the frequency of 60-10,000 Hz was manufactured. Moreover, the newly made SC can be modified into many different forms and charged more than 30,000 times even after modification into curved forms.
Professor Park explained that the new SC technology would contribute to the development of deformable output devices and make a lower volume of the Internet of things (IoT) or wearable devices. This research was reported in the international energy science journal Joule, published by Cell Press, on November 8th.