Kaner and El-Kady are profiled in a new short film, talking about how they stumbled across their discovery. “There are only accidents in the sense that we were trying to find something else, and we realized what we had was better for a different application,” says Kader:
I think the eureka moment [was] when Mahar dragged me into the lab and said ‘take a look at this.’ He turned on a light bulb using this little piece of graphene. But the amazing thing is, it doesn’t stop working. After charging for two or three seconds, he ran this light for over five minutes. I thought, 'We have something very important here.'
They had accidentally created a graphene supercapacitor, which charges more quickly (and with more power) than regular batteries, making it a potential candidate to power a future generation of super-efficient gadgets, cars, and systems. While carbon nanotube capacitors are old hat, this supercapacitor solves the problem of electrical conductivity that has plagued other researchers. Kaner describes the device as “like a battery, but charges and discharges 100 to 1,000 times faster.” He imagines charging an iPhone in 30 seconds, or fully charging an electric car in minutes. Equally important are the supercapacitor’s environmental benefits: Unlike batteries, which contain toxic chemicals and metals, graphene is entirely biodegradable.
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