Scientists from the University of California, riverside have developed a technology to produce components for supercapacitors from regular waste. We are talking about polyethylene terephthalate or PET, which is made most of plastic bottles. This material is from an economic point of view is significantly superior to high-tech raw materials, like graphene or carbon nanotubes.
Development of supercapacitors is a core group of scientists from the University of California, riverside. Previously they were able to create a generic experimental design of such energy storage and now they are engaged in the search for the best materials for its components. Behind and validation of graphene and recycling of glass bottles, and now they’re engaged in PET packaging.
In simplified form, processing of plastic looks like. The pieces of the bottle were dissolved and subjected to electrospinning to separate the individual fibres. Those are burned in a furnace for carbon emissions, which is mixed from two components – binder and conductive. The resulting material becomes part of the bilayer plates nanometer size, which is used as electrode of supercapacitor.
The main advantage of the supercapacitor before the same lithium-ion batteries high speed charging, but for that you have to pay a significantly lower battery capacity. Therefore, for effective operation of the equipment requires a lot of supercapacitors, and therefore the components should be cheap and easy to manufacture. Use for these purposes PET will allow to solve two tasks: to save on production and reduce waste. This is what’s called “upcycling” or recycling is a simple plastic recycling.
Source — University of California