Rice University scientists advanced their recent development of laser-induced graphene (LIG) by producing and testing stacked, three-dimensional supercapacitors, energy-storage devices that are important for portable, flexible electronics.
The Rice lab of chemist James Tour discovered last year that firing a laser at an inexpensive polymer burned off other elements and left a film of porous graphene, the much-studied atom-thick lattice of carbon. The researchers viewed the porous, conductive material as a perfect electrode for supercapacitors or electronic circuits.
To prove it, members of the Tour group have since extended their work to make vertically aligned supercapacitors with laser-induced graphene on both sides of a polymer sheet. The sections are then stacked with solid electrolytes in between for a multilayer sandwich with multiple microsupercapacitors.
The flexible stacks show excellent energy-storage capacity and power potential and can be scaled up for commercial applications. LIG can be made in air at ambient temperature, perhaps in industrial quantities through roll-to-roll processes, Tour said.
The research was reported this week in Applied Materials and Interfaces.
Capacitors use an electrostatic charge to store energy they can release quickly, to a camera’s flash, for example. Unlike chemical-based rechargeable batteries, capacitors charge fast and release all their energy at once when triggered. But chemical batteries hold far more energy. Supercapacitors combine useful qualities of both – the fast charge/discharge of capacitors and high-energy capacity of batteries – into one package.
LIG supercapacitors appear able to do all that with the added benefits of flexibility and scalability. The flexibility ensures they can easily conform to varied packages – they can be rolled within a cylinder, for instance – without giving up any of the device’s performance.
“What we’ve made are comparable to microsupercapacitors being commercialized now, but our ability to put devices into a 3-D configuration allows us to pack a lot of them into a very small area,” Tour said. “We simply stack them up.
“The other key is that we’re doing this very simply. Nothing about the process requires a clean room. It’s done on a commercial laser system, as found in routine machine shops, in the open air.”
Ripples, wrinkles and sub-10-nanometer pores in the surface and atomic-level imperfections give LIG its ability to store a lot of energy. But the graphene retains its ability to move electrons quickly and gives it the quick charge-and-release characteristics of a supercapacitor. In testing, the researchers charged and discharged the devices for thousands of cycles with almost no loss of capacitance.
To show how well their supercapacitors scale up for applications, the researchers wired pairs of each variety of device in serial and parallel. As expected, they found the serial devices delivered double the working voltage, while the parallels doubled the discharge time at the same current density.
The vertical supercapacitors showed almost no change in electrical performance when flexed, even after 8,000 bending cycles.
Tour said that while thin-film lithium ion batteries are able to store more energy, LIG supercapacitors of the same size offer three times the performance in power (the speed at which energy flows). And the LIG devices can easily scale up for increased capacity.
“We’ve demonstrated that these are going to be excellent components of the flexible electronics that will soon be embedded in clothing and consumer goods,” he said.
Also…
A new step towards using graphene in electronic applications
A team of the University of Berkeley and the Centre for Materials Physics (CSIC-UPV/EHU) has managed, with atomic precision, to create nanostructures combining graphene ribbons of varying widths. The work is being published in the prestigious journal Nature Nanotechnology.
Few materials have received as much attention from the scientific world or have raised so many hopes with a view to their potential deployment in new applications as graphene has. This is largely due to its superlative properties: it is the thinnest material in existence, almost transparent, the strongest, the stiffest and at the same time the most strechable, the best thermal conductor, the one with the highest intrinsic charge carrier mobility, plus many more fascinating features. Specifically, its electronic properties can vary enormously through its confinement inside nanostructured systems, for example. That is why ribbons or rows of graphene with nanometric widths are emerging as tremendously interesting electronic components. On the other hand, due to the great variability of electronic properties upon minimal changes in the structure of these nanoribbons, exact control on an atomic level is an indispensable requirement to make the most of all their potential.
The lithographic techniques used in conventional nanotechnology do not yet have such resolution and precision. In the year 2010, however, a way was found to synthesise nanoribbons with atomic precision by means of the so-called molecular self-assembly. Molecules designed for this purpose are deposited onto a surface in such a way that they react with each other and give rise to perfectly specified graphene nanoribbons by means of a highly reproducible process and without any other external mediation than heating to the required temperature. In 2013 a team of scientists from the University of Berkeley and the Centre for Materials Physics (CFM), a mixed CSIC (Spanish National Research Council) and UPV/EHU (University of the Basque Country) centre, extended this very concept to new molecules that were forming wider graphene nanoribbons and therefore with new electronic properties. This same group has now managed to go a step further by creating, through this self-assembly, heterostructures that blend segments of graphene nanoribbons of two different widths.
The forming of heterostructures with different materials has been a concept widely used in electronic engineering and has enabled huge advances to be made in conventional electronics. “We have now managed for the first time to form heterostructures of graphene nanoribbons modulating their width on a molecular level with atomic precision. What is more, their subsequent characterisation by means of scanning tunnelling microscopy and spectroscopy, complemented with first principles theoretical calculations, has shown that it gives rise to a system with very interesting electronic properties which include, for example, the creation of what are known as quantum wells,” pointed out the scientist Dimas de Oteyza, who has participated in this project. This work, the results of which are being published this very week in the prestigious journal Nature Nanotechnology, therefore constitutes a significant success towards the desired deployment of graphene in commercial electronic applications.
Dr Dimas G. de Oteyza, who was previously at Berkeley and at the CFM, is currently working at the Donostia International Physics Center (DIPC) as a Fellow Gipuzkoa. The Fellows Gipuzkoa programme, funded by the Chartered Provincial Council of Gipuzkoa, is in fact devoted to bringing back young researchers with solid post-doctoral training in internationally prestigious groups and centres, by offering them a platform for reincorporation through contracts with a duration of up to five years, which enables them to compete in the best of conditions to obtain tenured positions as researchers in our country.
– Credit and Resource –
Applied Materials and Interfaces, pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/am509065d
Provided by Rice University
“Bandgap Engineering of Bottom-Up Synthesized Graphene Nanoribbons by Controlled Heterojunctions.” Y.-C. Chen, T. Cao, C. Chen, Z. Pedramrazi, D. Haberer, D. G. de Oteyza, F. Fischer, S. Loiue, M. F. Crommie, Nature Nanotechnology (2015) DOI: 10.1038/nnano.2014.307.
Journal reference: Nature Nanotechnology search and more info website
Provided by University of the Basque Country
Laser-induced graphene 'super' for electronics
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