A Supercapacitor From Mushrooms

The supercapacitor is a particularly promising vitality storage know-how, and although they’ve but to succeed in parity with one of the best batteries by way of vitality density, affords appreciable promise for a way forward for protected and reasonably priced vitality storage. Maybe better of all from our standpoint, they’re surprisingly easy to make. A sensible supercapacitor will be made on the bench by virtually anybody, because the ever-resourceful [Robert Murray-Smith] demonstrates using mushrooms as his feedstock.

The concept of a supercapacitor is to switch the flat plate on the easy capacitor out of your physics textbook with one which has as giant a floor space as potential for cost to build up on. On this case the floor is fashioned from natural charcoal, a substance which retains one thing of the microscopic construction of no matter it was made out of. Mushrooms are feedstock, as a result of their mycelium construction has a naturally big floor space. He takes us within the video beneath the break by the method of carbonizing them, a lot simpler when you have got a useful kiln than attempting the charcoal-burner technique, after which grinds them to a powder earlier than making use of them as a paste with a binder to a chunk of graphite foil. With two of those electrodes and a chunk of paper towel as a dielectric, he demonstrates a easy benchtop supercapacitor operating a small electrical motor for a surprisingly longer time than we anticipated.

We’d prefer to see additional work on handmade supercapacitors, as we imagine they’ve immense potential in addition to storing the stuff. In the meantime, this is by no means the most unexpected supercapacitor material we’ve seen.

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Mushroom picture: Devika0067, CC BY-SA 4.0.