Production, Modification and Scale-up of Graphene Sponge for Supercapacitor Application

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Graphene is the new wonder material that has emerged at the forefront of all research initiatives due to its unique and high performance-enabling properties. Electrochemical supercapacitors become more and more popular as it has much high power density than batteries. Prof. Aiping Yu at the University of Waterloo has already partnered with Grafoid Inc. on modification of graphene for supercapacitor technology development through NSERC CRD (Nov. 2013-Dec. 2015) program and the collaboration is very successful, has already reached exciting achievements, including a few published papers, two pending patents, and a trade mark product SpongycarbonTM . SpongycarbonTM is composed of a type I product which is a pure graphene sponge, and a type II product which is graphene coated on the polyurethane sponge. Since previous CRD program will end Dec. 2015. To continue to explore the produced new product and pursue more opportunity in energy storage filed, Grafoid and Dr. Yu have planned to work on this newly proposed project. Graphene sponge, also called graphene aerogel or foam, is a porous, low density, high surface area and high electrical/thermal conductivity material, naturally making itself one of the best candidates for energy storage application, such as supercapacitor, fuel cell and battery, as well as filler for polymer composites used for thermal interface materials and conductive adhesive in electronic, EMI shielding, etc. Typically in this CRD, Grafoid and Dr. Yu' team is planning to work on further improve the production of the graphene sponge, and further improve the properties of the sponge through chemical modification and manipulation. The modified and optimized graphene sponge will be employed to be used as electrodes in supercapacitor. Further scale-up of the material and process will be performed at different level in order for Grafoid to take over the technology and implement into their own product line. The objective is that the improves sponge will show significantly improved capacitance and reaching energy density approximately 30-50 Wh/kg. The proposed new materials and technology will significantly change the surface properties of graphene sponge and improve the performance of supercapacitors. the team strongly believes the progress made in the proposed research will allow Grafoid to successfully apply these high-tech materials and launch high performance products to the market.