Reverse engineering supercapacitors

Supervisors

• Prof Derek Abbott
• Dr Andrew Allison

Honours students

• Yueran Zhu

Project Description:

A supercapacitor is like battery but can be charged and discharged much faster. It can hold charge for longer. It can withstand many more charge/discharge cycles than a rechargeable battery.

Can they be used for renewable energy storage? This is a question at the heart of this project. A typical 3000 Farad supercapacitor is small and only about 4 cm long. Could we put 200 of these together and create a better and cheaper alternative to a Tesla house battery? No one knows the answer really. So this motivates your investigation.....

What we want you to do is to go on websites such as AliBabar and buy several different supercapacitors around 3000 F. Try to find ones that use different technologies. They typically cost around $30 each, so your project budget is enough to get a few.

Then in the lab we want you to build a set-up to do an automated measurement of their I-V characteristics, so that you see can how good each one is.

Now here's the fun part: we want to to saw or smash each capacitor up to see what's inside. We want your to go to the Uni's Microscopy centre and get electron microscope photos of the fine internal structure.

We then want you to put fragments of each capacitor and a glass slide and get the Microscopy centre to scan it with their mass spectrometer. So you will find out what each capacitor is really made of. Then we want you to use your understanding of each capacitor to explain any differences in I-V characteristics.

For the best capacitor would it be suitable for working in a cluster of 200 for energy storage? That is a question you can start to attack to see if you can get close to an answer.

Weekly progress and questions

This is where you record your progress and ask questions. Make sure you update this every week.

• weekly progress

Deliverables

Semester A

• Proposal seminar (12 April)
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• Progress report - only one report needed in wiki format (4 June)
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Semester B

• Final seminar (2 November )
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• Final report - only one report needed in wiki format (29 October)
  • Final Report, 2021
• Project exhibition Poster - one poster only needed (5 October)
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• YouTube video:
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