Stefan Mileschin

Works at a stretch

Boffins at Duke University and Michigan State University have engineered a novel type of supercapacitor that remains fully functional even when stretched to eight times its original size.

According to Matter science journal, which we get for its spot the proton competition, the supercapacitors do not exhibit any wear and tear from being stretched repeatedly and lose only a few percentage points of energy performance after 10,000 cycles of charging and discharging. It could be the key to creating wearable electronics or biomedical devices.

The boffins included Changyong Cao, assistant professor of packaging, mechanical engineering and electrical and computer engineering at Michigan State University (MSU), and senior author Jeff Glass, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Duke. Their co-authors are doctoral students Yihao Zhou and Qiwei Han and research scientist Charles Parker from Duke, as well as Ph.D. student Yunteng Cao from the Massachusetts Institutes of Technology.

A supercapacitor stores energy like a battery, but stores energy through charge separation and cannot create its own electricity. It must be charged from an outside source. During charging, electrons are built up on one part of the device and removed from the other, so that when the two sides are connected, electricity quickly flows between them.

Supercapacitors are able to discharge their energy in short but massive bursts, rather than through a long, slow trickle. They can also charge and discharge much faster than a battery and tolerate many more charge-discharge cycles than a rechargeable battery. This makes them perfect for short, high power applications such as setting off the flash in a camera or the amplifiers in a stereo.

The downside of supercapacitors is that they are hard as any other component on a circuit board. That's why Cao and Glass have spent years working on a stretchable version.

https://fudzilla.com/news/50514-supe...y-to-wearables