The super-capacitor designed by material scientists at Vanderbilt University is the first made out of silicon so it can be built into a silicon chip along with the microelectronic circuitry that it powers.
It should be possible to construct these power cells out of the excess silicon that exists in the current generation of solar cells, sensors, mobile phones and a variety of other electromechanical devices, providing a considerable cost savings, researchers said.
"If you ask experts about making a super-capacitor out of silicon, they will tell you it is a crazy idea.
“But we've found an easy way to do it," said Cary Pint, assistant professor of mechanical engineering who headed the study.
Instead of storing energy in chemical reactions the way batteries do, "supercaps" store electricity by assembling ions on the surface of a porous material.
As a result, they tend to charge and discharge in minutes, instead of hours, and operate for a few million cycles, instead of a few thousand cycles like batteries. Pint and his colleagues decided to take a radically different approach: using porous silicon, a material with a controllable and well-defined
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