supercapacitors tagged posts

From stillage to storage: Turning bourbon byproducts into supercapacitors

From stillage to storage: Researchers turn bourbon byproducts into supercapacitors
Researchers converted bourbon distillery waste (left image) into electrodes for supercapacitors (right image) that store more energy per kilogram than commercial devices. Credit: Josiel Barrios Cossio

The state of Kentucky produces 95% of the world’s bourbon, and all that bourbon leaves behind an enormous amount of waste grain, called stillage. Now, researchers at the University of Kentucky have developed a process to transform that stillage into electrodes. With the bourbon byproduct electrodes, they created supercapacitors that could store more nergy than similarly sized commercial devices. The researchers will present their results at the spring meeting of the American Chemical Society (ACS Spring 2026), held in Atlanta from March 22 to 26.

Turning bourbon stillage into carbon
Jos...

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Charge your Laptop in a Minute? Supercapacitors can help; new research offers clues

Imagine if your dead laptop or phone could charge in a minute or if an electric car could be fully powered in 10 minutes. While not possible yet, new research by a team of CU Boulder scientists could potentially lead to such advances.

Published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers in Ankur Gupta’s lab discovered how ions, move within a complex network of minuscule pores. The breakthrough could lead to the development of more efficient energy storage devices, such as supercapacitors, said Gupta, an assistant professor of chemical and biological engineering.

“Given the critical role of energy in the future of the planet, I felt inspired to apply my chemical engineering knowledge to advancing energy storage devices,” Gupta said...

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New study finds ‘Sweet spot’ for Length of Yarn-shaped Supercapacitors

Yarn-shaped supercapacitors created by NC State researchers in the Wilson College of Textiles
Yarn-shaped supercapacitors created by NC State researchers in the Wilson College of Textiles. Photo courtesy of Nanfei He, NC State University.

As interest in wearable technology has surged, research into creating energy-storage devices that can be woven into textiles has also increased. Researchers at North Carolina State University have now identified a “sweet spot” at which the length of a threadlike energy storage technology called a “yarn-shaped supercapacitor” (YSC) yields the highest and most efficient flow of energy per unit length.

“When it comes to the length of the YSC, it’s a tradeoff between power and energy,” said Wei Gao, corresponding author of a paper on the work and an associate professor of textile engineering, chemistry and science at NC State.

“It’s not only...

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Supercapacitors challenge Batteries

graphene hybrid

Powerful graphene hybrid material for highly efficient supercapacitors. A team working with Roland Fischer, Professor of Inorganic and Metal-Organic Chemistry at the Technical University Munich (TUM) has developed a highly efficient supercapacitor. The basis of the energy storage device is a novel, powerful and also sustainable graphene hybrid material that has comparable performance data to currently utilized batteries.

Usually, energy storage is associated with batteries and accumulators that provide energy for electronic devices. However, in laptops, cameras, cellphones or vehicles, so-called supercapacitors are increasingly installed these days.

Unlike batteries they can quickly store large amounts of energy and put it out just as fast...

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