"If they were to replace batteries with these supercapacitors, you could charge your mobile phone in a few seconds and you wouldn't need to charge it again for more than a week," said postdoctoral associate Nitin Choudhary.
The team at UCF has experimented with applying newly discovered 2D materials only a few atoms thick to supercapacitors.
"There have been problems in the way people incorporate 2D materials into the existing systems. We developed a simple chemical synthesis approach so we can integrate the existing materials with the 2D materials," explained principal investigator Eric Jung.
The researchers are said to have developed supercapacitors composed of millions of nanometre-thick wires coated with shells of 2D materials. A conductive core facilitates fast electron transfer for fast charging and discharging, and uniformly coated shells of 2D materials yield high energy and power densities.
"For small electronic devices, our materials are surpassing the conventional ones worldwide in terms of energy density, power density and cyclic stability," Choudhary said.
A lithium-ion battery can be recharged fewer than 1500 times without significant failure. By comparison, the new process is claimed to yield a supercapacitor that doesn't degrade even after it's been recharged 30,000 times.
The supercapacitors could be used in wearables, phones and other electronic gadgets, as well as electric vehicles that could benefit from sudden bursts of power and speed.