Zinc Microcapacitors Are the Best of Both Worlds

As electronics shrink, they require smaller components—including for energy storage. Batteries store a lot of energy but deliver power more slowly, whereas supercapacitors can rapidly charge and discharge but don’t hold much energy. This is the case not only for larger bulk batteries and supercapacitors, but also at much smaller scales, with both microbatteries and microsupercapacitors having the same limitations as their bigger counterparts. Now researchers from University College London (UCL) have developed a hybrid energy-storage option that offers a better balance between storage capacity and discharge rates. The component, called a zinc-ion micro-capacitor (ZIMC), could one day find its way into compact devices, such as wearables, medical implants, and IoT devices. “It wasn’t our aim to outperform microbatteries and microsupercapacitors in every way,” says Buddha Deka Boruah, a lecturer in energy storage at UCL, “but to create a middle-ground device that balances energy and powe ... Read full article.