High Performance Micro Supercapacitors from Composite Films

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

John Jonker

Union College

Class of 2018

This project has been a passion project for me. I am extremely passionate about electrical engineering, specifically component and integrated circuit device design and usage, and chemistry. Nanotechnology is the perfect bridge between the two disciplines and it is extremely interesting and novel to utilize chemical synthetic methods to fabricate devices. Capacitors are extremely important passive components, seeing use

in analog devices as filter components or to bypass DC bias, in digital systems in DRAM, and in power systems as either a method to protect batteries from overcharging or potentially as a power source. Thin film capacitors exist today, but making use of composite ternary and/or quaternary systems is of extreme interest to engineers because reliability and performance can be improved by capitalizing on the properties of multiple materials. The goals of this project are to replicate devices already seen in literature and evaluate the applicability and practicality of published designs, understand the effect of nanomorphology on device performance, investigate possible alternative materials to the ones presented in literature, and add a fourth material to improve the order of the system and hopefully its performance.

The project started with the synthesis or purchase of the three primary components: manganese (IV) oxide nanoneedles, silver nanowires, and graphene oxide.  The first two were made in lab and graphene oxide was purchased. The two materials synthesized by me were each characterized morphologically and electrically. From here the components were dispensed in water and gravity filtered to produce a conductive ternary film. The film was then tested for how the composite looks with an SEM and then electrical measurements were taken with C-AFM. The films were then processed to make functional devices. After this process alternative materials and possible fourth elements will be added to see if performance improves. The highest performing device will then be implemented in a DC microgrid driver to see if such a device has practical use.