Nanowerk has reported on University of Michigan Professor John Hart’s Nanobama site featuring nanoscale designed faces of Barack Obama. The carbon nanotube faces consist of millions of aligned nanotubes, and shown via a scanning electron microscope.
Austin, Texas based Graphene Energy has raised $500,000 to expand its vision of bringing graphene-based ultracapacitors to market. Capacitors are a class of energy storage devices that hold physical charges of electricity.
The company hopes that their use of nanoscale designed carbon graphene sheets will improve ultracapacitor performance to support the shift towards electrive drive vehicles powered by the integration of batteries, fuel cells and capacitors. Together these three energy storage devices provide all the demands of electric vehicles - regenerative energy capture, scaling up, and bursts.
The Strongest Material in the Universe
Graphene is a single layer of carbon atoms arranged in a honeycomb lattice. Graphene has unique electro-, structural and mechanical properties, and is arguably the strongest known material in the universe given the combination of all known elements. For energy researchers, graphene is a new platorm for creating lower cost and more efficient components including: high surface area electrodes for energy storage devices, and backbone foundations for solar cells.
Carbon Graphene is closely related carbon nanotubes that are used to increase surface area of materials used in batteries, fuel cells, and solar cells. But graphene sheets have their own unique performance properties and have emerged as a very 'hot' area of research across a range of disciplines including advanced electronics (transistors & memory) and biotechnology.
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Hydrogen fuel cells, which produce electricity, are an evolution to modern day batteries. If we can store hydrogen efficiently as a solid, we can expand the use of energy from intermittent solar and wind power. We can also lower the costs and improve performance of electric vehicles. Two recent research announcements hint that cost effective storage could be much closer to reality.
Nanoscale science & surface area
One of the key enablers of storing hydrogen as a solid is high surface area. How much? Can you imagine holding a gram of material with surface area equal to several football fields for storing hydrogen molecules?
Nanoscale (billionth of a meter) material design means high surface area ratio to volume. We can also tap nanotechnology to create storage materials able to bind and release hydrogen molecules at low pressure and low temperature.
Carbon scaffolding for storage
There are a number of ways to store hydrogen as a solid, and also as a liquid. Earlier we featured a look at metal-organic frameworks or MOFs as a viable long term storage material. Today we’ll look at two other carbon-based hydrogen storage systems.
Carbon is a controversial storage medium since it is ‘sticky’ and can often bind hydrogen too tightly. But mixing (or ‘doping’) carbon with other elements can leverage the benefits of carbon’s high surface area and its Lego-like structural design.
‘Doping corn cobs?’
The Department of Energy has awarded $1.9 million to researchers at the University of Missouri and Midwest Research Institute (MRI)
The Missouri team has found that carbon briquettes (derived from corn cobs) then “doped” (or mixed and layered) with boron, have a unique ability to store natural gas with high capacity at low pressure.
While corn cobs hydrogen storage sounds a bit far fetched, one gram of this carbon material has a surface area comparable to a football field. The boron additive to carbon creates binding energies with H2 molecules that might make this a viable storage medium.
Carbon Graphene Layers
Another carbon based solution was announced last week from researchers in Greece using stacked thin sheets of carbon doped with lithium.
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