Pore Size Reduction Increases Energy Stored In Super Capacitors

Yury Gogotsi of Drexel University with his co-workers felt the necessity of studying a potential supercapacitor material at the atomic level to analyze certain experimental results. A research team under the supervision of Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s (ORNL) computational physicist Vincent Meunier and computational chemists Jingsong Huang and Bobby Sumpter enabled the analysis at the atomic level.

When you're talking about nanomaterials, however, that eye is pretty much useless unless it's looking through an electron microscope or at a computer visualization. Yet the pits and ridges on a seemingly flat surface—so small they are invisible without such tools—can give the material astonishing abilities. The trick for researchers interested in taking advantage of these abilities lies in understanding and, eventually, predicting how the microscopic topography of a surface can translate into transformative technologies.

Computational modeling of carbon supercapacitors with the effects of surface curvature included. (Image credit: Jingsong Huang, ORNL)

Drexel University's Yury Gogotsi and colleagues recently needed an atom's-eye view of a promising supercapacitor material to sort out experimental results that were exciting but appeared illogical. That view was provided by a research team led by Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) computational chemists Bobby Sumpter and Jingsong Huang and computational physicist Vincent Meunier.

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Source:http://www.ornl.gov/

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