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Next Generation Batteries Could Be Made With Silk, Study Finds

Next-Generation Batteries Could Be Made With Silk, Study Finds

By Indo-Asian News Service | Updated: 12 March 2015 18:10 IST

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Frustrated at your smartphone battery dying again? Wait till "green" silk comes to your rescue. Chinese researchers have developed a new "green" way to boost the performance of lithium-ion batteries with a material derived from silk.

According to Chuanbao Cao from Beijing Institute of Technology, carbon is a key component in commercial Li-ion energy storage devices including batteries and supercapacitors.

Most commonly, graphite fills that role but it has a limited energy capacity. Cao's team wanted to see if they could develop a material using a sustainable source.

The researchers found a way to process natural silk to create carbon-based nanosheets that could potentially be used in energy storage devices.

Their material stores five times more lithium than graphite can - a capacity that is critical to improving battery performance.

It also worked for over 10,000 cycles with only a nine percent loss in stability.

"We successfully incorporated their material in prototype batteries and supercapacitors in a one-step method that could easily be scaled up," Cao noted.

The paper appeared in the journal ACS Nano.

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Further reading: Battery, Mobiles, Silk, Tablets