Crumpled ‘graphene paper’ has potential to store energy

The finding is reported in the journal Scientific Reports by MIT’s Xuanhe Zhao, an assistant professor of mechanical engineering and civil and environmental engineering, and four other authors. The new, flexible superconductors should be easy and inexpensive to fabricate, the team claimed.

‘Many people are exploring graphene paper: It’s a good candidate for making supercapacitors, because of its large surface area per mass,’ Zhao said in a statement.

He said the development of flexible electronic devices, such as wearable or implantable biomedical sensors or monitoring devices, will require flexible power-storage systems.

Like batteries, supercapacitors can store electrical energy, but they primarily do so electrostatically, rather than chemically.

Now Zhao and his team have demonstrated that by crumpling a sheet of graphene paper into a mass of folds, they can make a supercapacitor that can easily be bent, folded, or stretched to as much as 800 per cent of its original size. The team has made a simple supercapacitor using this method as a proof of principle.