Supercapacitors murah dan hebat dari pangsa durian
Scientists
in Australia say durian has potential to charge devices in the future
04 Mar 2020
Local
fruits like durian and jackfruit could change the way we charge our smartphones
or electric cars in the future, according to a study highlighted in website Popular Mechanics.
A group of scientists led by associate professor Vincent G.
Gomes at the University of Sydney in Australia has found a way to turn fruit
cores from durian and jackfruit into potentially high-performing
electrochemical supercapacitors, or energy storage devices with high energy
density, which can then be further developed into applications such as batteries
for electronic devices and transportation.
"Supercapacitors
are promising for energy storage due to their superior cycling stability and
excellent charge-discharge ability," the scientists wrote in a paper. In
energy speak, a cycle refers
to the process of fully charging and draining a battery.
Supercapacitors have two main advantages over batteries used in
devices like smartphones – they can be recharged very quickly, and they can be
charged over and over without degrading them much, unlike lithium-ion batteries
that rely on chemical reaction to generate power.
Despite
these benefits, supercapacitors are not used as widely as batteries because
they generally have a lower energy density, and are also currently cost-prohibitive as
the industry's standard carbon-graphene mix (used to coat the electrodes in
supercapacitors) costs between RM400 and RM500 per gram – precisely what Gomes
and his team hope to address by turning to relatively inexpensive organic waste
from the jackfruit and the durian.
The
scientists detailed the process of extracting biomass samples from the
"inedible spongy core of each fruit" – or the white fibrous part of
the fruit that nobody eats – to turn them into black, highly porous and
ultralight forms of aerogel in a paper published in the Journal Of Energy Storage in
February.
According to the scientists, their approach has been
"successful in developing high surface area, aerogel-based electrodes
which have higher capacitances than traditional carbon materials" used in
today's supercapacitors. In other words, the scientists claimed that their new
biowaste-derived supercapacitors are higher-performing and cheaper than current
supercapacitors.
The scientists added that due to global warming and rapidly
depleting fossil fuels, there is a need to develop energy storage devices with
high energy density from alternative sources.
"Converting food wastes into value-added products will not
only improve the overall economy but also reduce environmental pollution,"
they concluded.
.
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