The team created the electrode designs from a highly conductive, 2D material called MXene. It believes its design could make energy storage devices like batteries as fast as supercapacitors.
"This paper refutes the widely accepted dogma that chemical charge storage, used in batteries and pseudocapacitors, is always much slower than physical storage used in electrical double-layer capacitors, known as supercapacitors," Drexel Professor Yury Gogotsi said.
"We demonstrate charging of thin MXene electrodes in tens of milliseconds. This is enabled by very high electronic conductivity of MXene. This paves the way to development of ultrafast energy storage devices than can be charged and discharged within seconds, but store much more energy than conventional supercapacitors."
According to the researchers, the key to faster charging energy storage devices is in the electrode design.
To store more energy, the materials should have places to put it. Electrode materials in batteries offer ports called ‘redox active sites’ for charge to be stored.
Paul Sabatier researchers produced a hydrogel electrode design with more redox active sites, which allows it to store as much charge for its volume as a battery.
To make the hydrogel electrode ports even more attractive to ion traffic, the Drexel-led team designed electrode architectures with open macroporosity to make each redox active sites in the MXene material readily accessible to ions.
