Howard Mao

EEC 247
March 30, 2016
Overview of Introducing the super-capacitor
This paper focuses on the efforts of a research group at UCLA to take
Moores Law and apply it to energy storage in the form of so-called
supercapacitors. The article begins with a statement about how Moores Law
has not led to a scaling-down of batteries, and gives examples of what todays
technology would look like if batteries had improved on a scale comparable to
what happened to integrated circuits. The paper then goes on to claim that such
an improvement is, in fact, possible if capacitors instead of batteries are used to
store charge. It then explains how supercapacitors able to store charge several
orders of magnitude above current capacitors can be fabricated using a cheap
and quick process, and ends by giving a few possible applications in which
these supercapacitors could be used.
The paper mentions that if the size of batteries had shrunk at the same
rate that silicon ICs have due to Moores Law in the last few decades, car
batteries would be the size of a red blood cell. However, because it is not
possible for any material to hold that much charge in that small of a volume,
Moores Law cannot be applied to batteries. Capacitors, though, can fill that role
and can benefit from Moores Law. It is possible to make a supercapacitor
utilizing an electrolyte as a dielectric which is able to provide a capacitance
many orders of magnitude greater than what is seen today. This can be done by
using graphene, which has an extremely high surface-to-volume ratio.
The group at UCLA made the supercapacitor by applying a substrate of
plastic onto a disc, coating the substrate with graphite oxide, using a
LightScribe machine to etch parts of the graphite oxide and turn it into
graphene, and finally adding one drop of electrolyte to the pattern. The only
real expense in this process is for the LightScribe machine, and they can make
one hundred such capacitors in less than thirty minutes. The capacitors have
capacitances from around 400 to 1000 microfarads. In an industrial setting, an
even larger amount of capacitors would be able to be made in a smaller amount
of time, which is why this can be seen as Moores Law applies to energy
storage.
The research group predicts that these capacitors would allow for easy
energy storage for solar cells owing to their small size and higher efficiency, and
that this could potentially apply to other forms of energy storage as well. They
also state that the liquid electrolyte can be replaced with a solid one, which
would greatly increase the lifetime of the capacitor. They even predict that
these capacitors could open up new areas for circuits to be used, such as on
bandages. The authors are hopeful that Moores Law will become relevant to
these capacitors as their production increases and they are more widely
adopted.