In recent days, Yangzhou University, School of Environmental Science and Engineering Laboratory, the school team Dr. Hou Jianhua use popcorn made of 'super battery' within 3 minutes can be fully charged, is expected to overcome the electric vehicle Driving mileage is short, charging a long development bottleneck.The inspiration for this invention, it is derived from his daughter when eating popcorn questions.
With the development of renewable clean energy, matched with the energy storage device research is also more and more attention.Hu Jianhua said that the super capacitor as a new type of energy storage device, because of its high power density, stability and long Cycle life and other advantages, has gradually into people's lives.Carbon materials because of its low cost and the ideal electrochemical properties, become the first choice of supercapacitor electrode material.Traditional carbon materials such as porous carbon, activated carbon and other capacity is limited, very large To a certain extent, limits the application of electrochemical energy storage devices in real life and hinders the progress of supercapacitors as the main power source. Therefore, the microstructure and chemical components of carbon materials are regulated to improve the electrochemical properties of carbon materials Performance is very necessary.
It is understood that the current control methods, such as the hard template method, the physical activation method, most of them can only be a single regulation of a feature of porous carbon, and the operation is usually more complicated and costly. Committed to the development of a simple, green , A scalable approach to the precise design of the structure of porous carbon to obtain supercapacitors with high energy density and power density has become the research direction of Hou Jianhua.
'Why is popcorn so crispy?' A question from a daughter eating popcorn inspired Hou Jianhua, who remembers the changes in the microstructure of corn from popcorn. 'Popcorn has a porous honeycomb structure, Popcorn as a supercapacitor material to store energy?
Today, Hou Jianhua and his team have prepared popcorn-based porous carbon sheets with a honeycomb-like nanosheet structure of 'ultrahigh' specific surface area and obtained supercapacitor devices with the highest energy density in biomass carbon materials.
How to store energy popcorn? Hou Jianhua said that corn microwave radiation for 2 minutes into fluffy popcorn, popcorn volume than corn particles to expand more than 25 times, the explosion formed a honeycomb structure, and further microwave carbonization Derived porous carbon nanosheets. "Popcorn honeycombs have an extremely high specific surface area and a perfect pore size, and a small piece of material can store a large amount of energy into the interior of its nanoplatelet-like porous, greatly improving the performance of the super-cell Storage capacity. "Hou Jianhua said.
It is understood that popcorn-based battery energy density has been reported in the highest value of biomass-derived carbon materials.Experimental results show that the use of popcorn made of super battery can be fully charged within 3 minutes, after 10,000 times the capacity after charging and discharging Still more than 95%. It is very promising to overcome the bottleneck of the short-term development of electric vehicles and the long charging time so as to meet the urgent needs of the major power sources for electric vehicles.
In addition to popcorn, Dr. Hou also employs supercapacitors made of other 'green materials' such as lanterns, tofu, rice, fried dough sticks, etc., especially in combination with the use of crop stalks' intrinsic void structure. According to reports, these materials Popcorn has the same principle, such as lanterns, when not open is very small, fluffy up after opening up, a small hole in the space you can store power, while this is a very Chinese technology.
At present, the research results are published in the international academic journal "ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces." The research work has also been supported by such projects as the National Natural Science Youth Fund, the Provincial Natural Science Youth Fund and the University Science and Technology Innovation Fund.
