7 December 2012—Owners of
electric cars may soon be driving on eggshells, if
David Mitlin has anything to say about it.
Mitlin, a professor of chemical and
materials engineering at the
University of Alberta, in
Edmonton, Canada, is working on a way to turn
waste
eggshell membranes and egg whites into materials for
high-performance
supercapacitors.
Supercapacitors offer high power density, charging and discharging far
faster than
rechargeable batteries. Unfortunately, they store much less
energy. Mitlin thinks the membranes inside eggshells could help crack
that problem.
“If you could keep the very nice power of a
supercap but extend the
energy density even to be that of a mediocre
lithium-ion battery, you’d
really enable the applications world in the automotive sector and in
consumer products,” Mitlin told attendees at the
Materials Research Society’s Fall Meeting in
Boston last week.
Supercapacitors are electrochemical devices that store a double layer
of charge on activated carbon as electrodes. Mitlin and postdoctoral
fellow Zhi Li propose replacing the activated carbon with eggshell
membranes from certain industrial chicken farms. These farms provide
eggs yolks for the production of medicine and cosmetics but discard the
shells.
Source:IEEE
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