Silk to power next-generation batteries

Beijing, March 12, 2015: Again frustrated at dead smartphone battery again? Wait till "green" silk comes to your rescue. Chinese researchers have developed a new "green" way to boost the performance of lithium-ion batteries with a material derived from silk. According to Chuanbao Cao from Beijing Institute of Technology, carbon is a key component in commercial Li-ion energy storage devices including batteries and supercapacitors. Most commonly, graphite fills that role but it has a limited energy capacity. Cao's team wanted to see if they could develop a material using a sustainable source. The researchers found a way to process natural silk to create carbon-based nanosheets that could potentially be used in energy storage devices. Their material stores five times more lithium than graphite can - a capacity that is critical to improving battery performance. It also worked for over 10,000 cycles with only a nine percent loss in stability. "We successfully incorporated their material in prototype batteries and supercapacitors in a one-step method that could easily be scaled up," Cao noted. The paper appeared in the journal ACS Nano