Nanowerk January 13, 2023
Currently commercialized supercapacitors still suffer from limited energy densities. Taking inspiration from anolis lizard, an international team of researchers (UK, China) has developed a supercapacitor with a “breathing” electrode. To breathe underwater the lizard brings along an air bubble that is attached to a layer of scales on their head. Under water, it repeatedly breathes this bubble in and out. The researchers used chlorine gas which iteratively reinspires in porous carbon materials, that improves the energy density by orders of magnitude. They showed that porous carbon with pore size around 3 nm delivers the best chlorine evolution and adsorption performance. The respiring supercapacitor with multi-wall carbon nanotube as the cathode and NaTi2(PO4)3 as the anode could store specific energy of 33 Wh kg−1 with negligible capacity loss over 30 000 cycles. The supercapacitor performs at an extremely high-power density of 50 000 W kg−1 due the reaction kinetics of chlorine gas. According to the researchers the energy density can be further improved to 53 Wh kg−1 by replacing NaTi2(PO4)3 with zinc anode…read more. TECHNICAL ARTICLE
