MIT researchers made a new supercapacitor without carbon read more at here www.spinonews.com/index.php/item/1234-mit-researchers-developed-a-new-supercapacitor-made-without-carbon

MIT researchers have developed a new supercapacitor that does not use carbon. It could potentially produce more power than existing versions of this technology.

Recently, scientists at MIT built a supercapacitor without carbon. In place of carbon, scientists deployed metal-organic frameworks (MOFs).

Mircea Dincă, an MIT associate professor of chemistry, said, we’ve found an entirely new class of materials for supercapacitors.

MOFs which are extremely porous, sponge-like structures. These materials have an extraordinarily large surface area for their size. Unfortunately, these materials are not conductive, which is also an essential property of a material used in a capacitor.

Dincă said, one of our long-term goals was to make these materials electrically conductive. MOFs don't conduct electricity very well, they conduct ions positively charged atoms and molecules. Ion conductivity is a key component of high-functioning electrode. The quality gave researchers hoped that an MOF could be used in supercapacitors.

For testing, researchers were able to develop an electrically conductive MOF uses Ni3(HITP)2 (Ni3(hexaiminotriphenylene)2).

When the researchers made a supercapacitor using the novel material, they matched the performance of today's best carbon-based supercapacitors. In some respects, like its ability to withstand many charge/discharge cycles.

Tests showed they lost less than 10 percent of their performance after 10,000 cycles, which is comparable to existing commercial supercapacitors.

Though the production of MOFs currently requires the use of rather expensive materials, the production process involves fewer toxic chemicals.

The new supercapacitor uses the conductive MOFs could be useful for making electrochromic windows, which can be darkened with the flip of a switch, and chemo resistive sensors, which could be useful for detecting trace amounts of chemicals for medical or security applications.