Research: Batteries made from nanotubes and paper

December 11, 2009 by timbercommunity

An describes that scientists in Stanford have made batteries and supercapacitors with little more than ordinary office paper and some carbon and silver nanomaterials. The paper-based devices show excellent performance largely due to paper’s porous nature: at the nano scale, paper is a tangled matrix of fibers. Calculations suggest that conductive paper coated with a kilogram of the carbon nanotubes could power a 40-watt bulb for an hour, making the paper more efficient than plastic-based versions of flat energy-storage devices. There is also a movie in Youtube. More information in the science magazine PNAS.