Graphene Supercapacitors Are About To Change The World - Here's How | Answers With Joe

today I'd like to start things off with the little game so take a second and look around you and count all the things all the devices around you that have batteries in it here I'll do it with you the computer I'm recording this on as a battery on it camera has a battery on it Mouse has batteries that are uncovered for some reason phone I got a sound recorder over here got my GoPro GoPro has a battery on it Oh microphone pack the point is our lives revolve around portable power batteries literally make our lives possible and that trend is only accelerating especially with the growing pace of electric cars so the race is on to develop newer better energy storage solutions our old friend the double-a battery the nickel cadmium battery it's done a good job but it's not rechargeable you can only use it once it's very wasteful you throw it away lithium-ion batteries are rechargeable but they take a really long time to charge they eventually lose effectiveness but there is a third option on the way it's called super capacitors they charge immediately they run forever and they never wear down there's just one thing we still have to figure out Super answer file Matt herring ask can you do a video on super capacitors Matt asked this question as a premier supporter on patreon if you want to know how to do the same of course as always go to patreon.com slash answers with Joe so how many times have you been texting somebody I'm doing general phone things and then all of a sudden man your plans have suddenly changed you've got to go find a cord and plug in you got to sit next to the electric thing if you want to keep doing your phone stuff I mean well man are we living in 2017 or aren't we so before I can explain how super capacitors will fix this I need to back up and show you how batteries work in the first place the simplest explanation is batteries transfer electrons from a negatively charged electrode called a nano to a positively charged electrode called a cathode and the device that the battery is powering siphons electrons off the power that device for example nickel-cadmium batteries use a nickel oxide cathode and a cadmium anode name and it produces electrons through a chemical process called oxidation which is used by an electrolyte layer sandwiched between the two electrodes in the case of nickel cadmium batteries they use potassium hydroxide as the electrolyte but this is a one-shot deal it produces electrons but there's no way to reintroduce electrons into the mix so they're not rechargeable and in a world that's increasingly reliant on portable devices that's just not good enough enter lithium ion batteries which are developed back in the 1970s by a guy named John be good enough that's his real name yes I know thank you I'm very proud to be the first person ever tell that joke it was hard lithium ion batteries according to my analytics anyway are responsible for powering the screens at about 75% of you are watching right now let's see my own batteries of a cathode made of lithium duh and a nano of made of carbon again with an electrolyte layer sandwiched in between the difference is lithium can absorb more electrons so we can be recharged which is great but it's still a chemical reaction meaning it takes some time for that charge to take place super capacitors work differently instead of using a chemical reaction to produce electrons also known as an electrochemical process they use static electricity also known as an electrostatic process ever shocked yourself on a doorknob after walking across carpet that's basically our super capacitors work now capacitors have been in our computers for decades and they basically work by holding opposing charges on two metal plates separated by a dielectric material and much like that doorknob shock the amount of electricity they carry is really tiny that it transfers really quickly super capacitors as you may have already figured out our larger versions of capacitors that actually double up those metallic plates so that they can hold more energy in fact they're often called double layered capacitors and the cool thing is since it's an electrostatic process instead of a chemical process there's far less resistance to charge in fact it's almost instantaneous the problem is they don't hold that much energy in fact you would have to have a vast amount of surface area in order to be able to get anywhere near the kind of storage capacity that a lithium-ion battery now so lithium ions have a high energy density meaning they hold a lot of electricity whereas super capacitors have a very high power density meaning they can transfer that energy much so if theoretically you could have super capacitors with the same energy density as lithium ion batteries you'd be able to charge your phone in seconds and be good for the rest of the day and with wireless charging on the forefront you might just be able to just set it down on a pad while you're eating breakfast then you're good to go you could charge your laptop and the time it takes you to take a whiz and dare we dream it an Eevee that actually charges faster than it takes to pump gas that is the dream and there is one material that can make this dream a reality called graphene graphene is basically a one layer thick lattice of carbon atoms and it has some just insane properties it's 200 times stronger than steel but incredibly light it's biodegradable is biocompatible I mean you can use it inside the human body they say it can be used to desalinate seawater it can build space elevators it could be the basis of supercomputers but for our purposes it also happens to be one of the most electrically capacitive substances known to man it has the same energy density as lithium ion batteries but with the power density of super capacitors and since it's only one atom thick you can cram a lot of surface area in a kind of space but much like the highly lauded carbon nanotubes which are basically just tubes made out of graphene these are very very hard to make in fact nothing I'm saying here is really all that new we've been hearing about super capacitors made out of graphene with about 2013 one of our very most frustrating technology hold us we have today actually it's not for lack of trying in fact some of the smartest people alive today are working feverishly to find a solution to this and in the last couple years there's been some interesting developments one group found that heating soybean oil to 800 degrees Celsius on a nickel foil caused the carbon atoms to arrange themselves in a one-layer lattice basically graphene so far they've only created a small credit-card sized sample but it's still a proof of concept another idea that could prove to be scalable is igniting acetylene and oxygen which causes the atoms to arrange themselves in that lattice over a large surface area the problem is it doesn't really arrange it in that one atom thick layer that we need it's a lot more chunky but it is a method that could be tweaked to get the results they want bottom line is the person or group is fine as the solution to this problem is going to be seriously seriously rich so because of that there's a lot of people who are incentivized work on it that's a good thing with any luck in 10 or 15 years we'll have super capacitor batteries that can handle energy density that industrial scales giving us fast easy electricity whenever we need it in the meantime our old friend John be good enough in his colleague Helena Braga have worked on a new battery that uses a solid electrolyte that many are calling the impossible battery it stores three times as much energy of the lithium ion and uses a sodium anode so it's biodegradable and all the materials are cheap and easy to come by 94 years old still innovating good show old chap there's also the idea of hybrid batteries that contain both a lithium ion and super capacitors so they get the best of both worlds now this of course was a very high level view there's a lot of pros and cons with super capacitors and you can learn more about it in the links I put down the description but let's talk about in the comments what do you think do you think that the promise of super capacitors is overhyped why or why not I for one think that this isn't that that we're going to crack I mean there's just such an incentive for a person or a company to figure this out that somebody's going to do it eventually and it will probably be extremely expensive for a while all new technologies are but I mean just look at cell phones in the way once it becomes you know normal and adopted it takes off you know but I really think that once it gets figured out it could be a real fundamental shift in the way we live our lives especially when it comes to things like electric cars so thanks to Matt for this question I thought was a very relevant question and I'm actually really glad I did this research because like I said I've been hearing about this for a long time kind of fell off the radar but it turns out there's actually some cool developments on the way gives me some hope that this is going to change things pretty soon and I'm telling you like if you're looking for a field to get into material science is the way to go that's that's where all the major innovations that are going to just change the world are coming from so that's my suggestion look into material science I also want to thank all my other supporters on patreon we're at over 120 now which is crazy pants but I wanted to give a shout out to the people who have joined since the last video we got Michael Lewis jean-claude lemon Margaret Cooley Greg Forsythe Steven Hughes Pete's Bennigan's Michael Lumbergh Mason Petrovsky Ajit and Chris from legion of weirdos who i got to hang out with at VidCon he's actually got a great Channel himself go check that out if you like my kind of stuff and as always the sponsor for this video anchor boy comm if you get canker sores and mouth ulcers on a regular basis like I do bane of my existence ahead of my whole life this is a supplement that actually prevents you from getting them it works you can give it a try just go to canker boy calm like and share if you liked it and if this is your first time here I encourage you to go check out some of my other videos because I'll talk about similar topics like this every Monday and if you like that maybe subscribe because I'm gonna keep doing them alright thanks a lot for watching you guys go out and have an eye-opening week and I will see you next Monday love you guys

Channel: Joe Scott

Views: 901,118

Rating: 4.6604304 out of 5

Keywords: answers with joe, supercapacitors, battery technology, lithium-ion batteries, how a lithium ion battery works, nickel-cadmium batteries, batteries, EV cars, capacitors, energy storage, electric cars, phone charger, phone battery, graphene

Id: 9CDzrDjBTNU

Length: 9min 17sec (557 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 03 2017