Home
Mobiles
Mobiles News
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

Click Here to Add Gadgets360 As A Trusted Source

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.

Comments

Get your daily dose of tech news, reviews, and insights, in under 80 characters on Gadgets 360 Turbo. Connect with fellow tech lovers on our Forum. Follow us on X, Facebook, WhatsApp, Threads and Google News for instant updates. Catch all the action on our YouTube channel.