Nanoelectronics: NAMS Researchers Develop a High-Performance Printed Supercapacitor

June 2020

Supercapacitor is an alternative to battery for energy storage, featuring much higher power density and faster charging. Commercial supercapacitors are finding their way in automotive, buses, regenerative breaking, cranes and other applications, which require rapid charging and high specific power. More recently, printing supercapacitors on flexible substrates has been receiving much attention to meet the anticipated demands of emerging Internet of Things.

NAMS researchers Myeonglok Seol, Dong-il Lee and Jin-Woo Han along with their colleagues from NASA Marshall and Johnson Space Centers developed an in-plane printed solid-state supercapacitor, which showed an extended durability of 100,000 cycles, retaining over 99% of the performance. In contrast, cell phone batteries lose more than 25% of their capacity after 1000 to 1500 cycles.

The printed supercapacitors showed much higher power density but lower energy density than rechargeable batteries. More importantly, radiation tests performed at NASA Johnson Space Center revealed negligible change in the performance of the supercapacitors after exposure to the equivalent of 38 years of radiation on the surface of Mars. The results were published in a recent issue of the journal ACS Applied Energy Materials (Vol. 3, pp. 4965-4973, 2020). This work was sponsored by the NASA In Space Manufacturing Program which strives to print various components and devices such as sensors, antennas, batteries, supercapacitors, energy generation devices and others in the future in the Space Station.