Laser-induced graphene ‘super’ for electronics – supercapacitors

An electron microscope image shows the cross section of laser-induced graphene burned into both sides of a polyimide substrate. The flexible material created at Rice University has the potential for use in electronics or for energy storage.

Rice University researchers test flexible, three-dimensional supercapacitors

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.”

Read more here: Laser-induced graphene ‘super’ for electronics