14 DAY TRIAL // We suppose it would have been strange for more than a month or two to pass without some new breakthrough in the field of graphene. That wonder of all wonderful materials needs to wow the world periodically after all, or so the story goes.
Graphene is a carbon-based material that can do everything and be turned into practically anything, at least as far as electronic devices are concerned.
It can be used to create super-tough shells, produce superconductors better than anything we've ever dreamed, store energy, and so on and so forth.
The breakthrough that an MIT research group has for us now lies in the area of power generation, or rather power storage for mobile consumer electronics gadgets.
Graphene can become the best super-capacitor ever
Graphene is basically a single molecule-thick layer of graphite, that material that the core of a pencil is made of. For a long time, we only used it to draw stuff. Clearly, the science community isn't even remotely satisfied with that.
Xuanhe Zhao, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering and civil and environmental engineering, has discovered that crumpled graphene could become the basis for flexible and wearable device power sources.
He compared it to crumpling a piece of paper, only with benefits. According to him, the graphene becomes a very, very flexible super-capacitor that can store a large amount of energy electrostatically.
During the experiments led by Zhao, the team folded graphene around 1,000 times, leading to a capacitor that was very easy and safe to bend, but which could stretch a fair bit as well.
First, a machine compressed it in one direction, leading to the initial set of folds. Then, the graphene was compressed along a different axis. The result was an utter mess that didn't break only because graphene is very, very tough by nature.
What remained was to stuff a hydrogel in between two “sheets” of the material and voila! The super-capacitor was ready. The end result was like a sandwich: a separator & electrolyte in the middle, with two sheets of graphene (one on either side) and two sheets of plastic on top of those. The top and bottom surfaces act as +/- contact points.
It's a very big step forward, because capacitors that can stretch have been giving scientists a headache for a long time.
Applications
Everything from flexible telephones and music players to medical application sensors and maybe even implants are within the realm of possibility.
