We’re working on experiments that we hadn’t
even thought of 10 years ago, even 5 years ago
Graphene throws up all sorts of new challenges
for completely new types of science to do.
It’s hard to think of another type of material
in which you would have those sorts of challenges
thrown up on a weekly, almost daily basis.
That’s what’s really exciting about graphene.
Graphene was first isolated and many of its
properties were first identified by scientists
working in the physics department at Manchester
from 2004 onwards. What has happened over
the last decade is there’s been a big expansion
of graphene work into my own department, which
is Chemistry, into Materials Science, into
the Life Sciences and into Engineering.
Really, I think the advantage we have in Manchester
is we have a lot of fundamental expertise
from the physics department in graphene but
we have a seamless transition from the very
fundamental properties to the applications
which are being explored.
In the field of energy storage in particular,
I think everybody knows that there’s a problem
with batteries. Why is graphene interesting
for batteries and the other type of energy
storage device based on electrochemistry which
are things called supercapacitors?
An electro-material has to conduct electricity
but it should also be light and energy is
stored, basically as a function of the volume
or the area of the device. So you want a high
surface, high volume, light, stable, conducting
material and the advantage of graphene is
that it basically ticks all those boxes, as
a material which people hadn’t conceived
or had only theoretically conceived but didn’t
think could exist more than 10 years ago.
It’s difficult to get energy in and out
of batteries quickly, so for your initial
burst of acceleration, if you had for example,
an electric Ferrari, then how would you get
your 0-60 in under a second? It’s hard to
image that you could get that from a battery,
a supercapacitor would be the way to get that
kick of energy you need to accelerate quickly.
We could have flexible power storage, we could
have batteries and supercapacitors that are
bendable and therefore because graphene doesn’t
break, or it’s very hard to break graphene
and therefore could be sewn into for example
fabric. So you could store the energy within
or have the energy storage device sewn into
your clothes, where you could have some graphene
based energy storage device that might even
be effectively sewn into somebody’s skin.
You could imagine that’s science fiction
but I can’t see why that wouldn’t happen
in the future.
Because we’re relying more and more on renewable
energy from wind, from the tide, from the sun,
then we need ways of storing that energy,
and how do you store that energy? Well essentially
giant banks of batteries and supercapacitors
are feasible ways of storing that energy but
we need to improve the technology and graphene
can really make a difference there.
