Paper batteries beat plastic ones
Yes, you read that right. Paper batteries/supercapacitors have been created at Stanford University. Painting a normal sheet of paper with a special ink will give you a battery that is capable of over 40,000 charge-discharge cycles, rivaling lithium ion batteries.
Yi Cui, assistant professor of materials science and engineering, had previously created similar batteries out of plastic but found that they didn’t work as well as his new paper battery. The ink used to create the battery didn’t adhere as well to plastic as it does to paper.
As the above picture of Bing Hu, a post-doctoral fellow illustrates, the battery is made by coating a sheet of paper, say copy paper for example, with ink comprised of carbon nanotubes and silver nanowires. The resulting product is a “highly conductive storage device.”
The paper battery can be bent, folded, crumpled and submerged in acidic or basic solutions without damaging the performance of the battery. Cui says, “We just haven’t tested what happens when you burn it.”
These new batteries/supercapacitors have a variety of ways in which they can be used. According to his article published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences:
this conductive paper can be used as an excellent lightweight current collector in lithium-ion batteries to replace the existing metallic counterparts. This work suggests that our conductive paper can be a highly scalable and low-cost solution for high-performance energy storage devices.
Along with improving lithium ion batteries, paper supercapacitors would be useful in electric and hybrid cars because of its ability to quickly transfer electricity when needed. Another example of its potential is a cheap electrode for other electrical devices.
Paper batteries may also be used as “large-scale storage of electricity on the distribution grid.” When used by solar and wind farms, the batteries would store any excess energy and would discharged it during times when the sun and wind aren’t generating enough energy to meet demand.
Who knows, these paper batteries are low cost and scalable meaning they can be used for small tasks as well as large ones. One day we may be buying our batteries by the sheet instead of the pack.
