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The findings hold promise for storage in energy grids, electric cars, and consumer electronics.

Supercapacitors, known as the “sprinters” among electrical energy storage devices because of the speedy efficiency they hold over batteries, usually hold much less electrical charge. Batteries are like marathon runners, delivering energy slowly, but steadily.

The new research is published in the journal Science.

“We synthesized a new sponge-like carbon that has a surface area of up to 3,100 square meters per gram (two grams has a surface area roughly equivalent to that of a football field),” says Rodney Ruoff, professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Texas-Austin.

“It also has much higher electrical conductivity and, when further optimized, will be superb for thermal management as well. The processes used to make this porous carbon are readily scalable to industrial levels.

“After we realized that we had a new carbon with a highly novel structure that showed superb performance as an electrode, we knew that this direction of research — to create carbon materials that consist of a continuous three-dimensional porous network with single-atom-thick walls — was likely to yield the optimum electrode material for supercapacitors.”

To synthesize the carbon material, the scientists used microwaves to exfoliate graphite oxide, followed by treatment with potassium hydroxide, which created a carbon full of tiny holes—essentially a sponge that, when combined with an electrolyte, can store a giant electrical charge.

Colleagues at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York then analyzed the atomic structure of the carbon material at the nanoscale using very high resolution electron microscopes.

Their observations confirmed Ruoff’s hypothesis that the carbon was a new three-dimensional material having highly curved, single-atom-thick walls that form tiny pores.

Researchers from the University of Texas at Dallas contributed to the study.

More news from University of Texas at Austin: www.utexas.edu/news/