"In industrial applications, time is money," said assistant professor Peter Pauzauskie. "We can make the starting materials for these electrodes in hours, rather than weeks. And that can significantly drive down the synthesis cost for making high performance supercapacitor electrodes."
"Supercapacitors can act much faster than batteries because they are not limited by the speed of the reaction or by-products that can form," doctoral student Matthew Lim added.
To get the high surface area for an efficient electrode, the team used aerogels, which were said to demonstrate a high surface area and extremely low density.
"One gram of aerogel contains about as much surface area as one football field," said Pauzauskie.
The team made the aerogels from a gel-like polymer, a material with repeating structural units, created from formaldehyde and other carbon-based molecules.
The researchers then treated molybdenum disulphide or tungsten disulphide with high frequency sound waves to break them up into thin sheets and incorporated them into the carbon-rich gel matrix.
After obtaining the dried, low-density aerogel, they combined it with adhesives and another carbon-rich material, which could be rolled out into sheets. They cut half-inch discs from the dough and assembled them into simple coin cell battery casings to test the material's effectiveness as a supercapacitor electrode.
According to the researchers, the electrodes had a capacitance of at least 127% greater than the carbon-rich aerogel alone.
The team believes their method to trap materials quickly in aerogels could be applied to high capacitance batteries or catalysis.