Kind: captions
Language: en
there's a lot of talk about renewable
energy but how feasible is it a major
barrier believe it or not is battery
storage and that's where something
called super capacitors come in they run
on static electricity and they're
capable of recharging and delivering
power faster than batteries but they
don't store as much energy yet enter
chemist Rick ker you see super
capacitors are limited by the surface
area available for holding electrons and
caner developed a technique to produce
electrodes with lots of surface area out
of graphite this is what graphite looks
like as it comes out of the ground it's
a mineral and this is what's in a pencil
absolutely so a pencil is nothing more
than graphite combined with Clay so this
is the material that's used in
essentially all batteries as at least
one of the electrodes so the the
question is whether you could make this
in a high surface area form and that is
where graphing comes in graphing is the
strongest material ever tested it's a
layer of carbon that's 1 atom thick
giving it extremely high surface area
ker says one gram of the stuff would
cover four football fields graphine
provides the high surface area and
conductivity necessary to store large
amounts of charge which means graphine
might just allow super capacitors to be
even more Super and Ker's lab has come
up with a surprising way to make it it
starts with plain old graphite this is a
chunk of graphite oxide that was mixed
with water and then freeze dried Mahar
eladi hits it with an ordinary camera
flash Big Flash yeah it's just little
big so just watch what was going to
happen okay oh the pulse of Lights
converted to heat burning away the
oxygen and leaving behind graphine
that's graphine right there so what's
leftt over we call it na graphine F
Ker's lab has developed a system to
print exact designs a layer of plastic
gets coated onto the surface of a CD
with a solution of graphite oxide once
dry it's inserted into a CD laser
labeler that's wild put it but instead
of doing its usual job of etching a
label wherever the laser hits the dried
graphite oxide that spots transformed
into
graphine I like this technology aside
from a graphine likeness of David POG
elad's printed two graphine electrodes
obviously there 's a huge worldwide
market for CDs with pictures of me in
graphine but but I'm guessing that that
these are more important to the future
of mankind you etched circuits out of
the graphine yeah so these circuits are
basically micro super capacitors and
this stores as much charge as these like
very bulky capacitors that you will find
in any electronic device you you mean
you mean this totally flat pattern right
now could hold as much charge as this
capacitor yes and we actually made a
store a thousand times more charg as
this size of a
capacitor if we could scale this to the
size of electric vehicles then you could
actually instead of pulling into a gas
station you'd pull into a charging
station and within minutes your car
would be ready to go an electric car
that you can charge as quickly as it
would take to fill up I I would
definitely like to see that happen and
that's exactly what we're working on
[Music]
WOW
[Music]