Professor Richard Kaner and Maher El-Kady (Kaner Lab), have developed a cost-effective and scalable method for producing micro-supercapacitors, which may have potential applications in roll-up displays, TVs, e-paper, and even wearable electronics.
Until now, micro-supercapacitors were not easily reproduced due to expensive microfabrication techniques, but, using a previously developed method for making graphene via a LightScribe DVD drive, Kaner and El-Kady were able to develop a large amount of micro-supercapacitors in a short amount of time.
“Traditional methods for the fabrication of micro-supercapacitors involve labor-intensive lithographic techniques that have proven difficult for building cost-effective devices, thus limiting their commercial application,” El-Kady said. “Instead, we used a consumer-grade LightScribe DVD burner to produce graphene micro-supercapacitors over large areas at a fraction of the cost of traditional devices. Using this technique, we have been able to produce more than 100 micro-supercapacitors on a single disc in less than 30 minutes, using inexpensive materials.”
This research was published in Nature Communications on February 12, 2013. The full news release can be read here.
