Paper Supercapacitors Coming Soon

Done with a gadget? Throw it away for easy recycling

Some eggheads at Stanford are working on a process to effectively "print" capacitors onto paper. It involves coating both sides of a sheet with a chemical called polyvinylidene fluoride (PVDF), which prepares the paper to bond with an application of ultra-tiny "single walled" carbon nanotubes (yes, nanotechnology also plays a part here).

The nanotubes are themselves the supercapacitor advertised in the headline, essentially a miniaturized version of the crucial electrical component found in consumer electronics and hybrid vehicles.

Why is this development interesting? Well, capacitors have many applications today. Aside from allowing radios to zero in on a frequency and shoring up electrical current to increase voltage, they also act as a power source of sorts. Stanford's creation is efficient enough to retain a reasonable capacity after around 2,500 claimed recharge cycles.

In other words, the dream of the Stanford development team is to come up with electronics that are truly a commodity. Once they've outlived their usefulness, these gadgets based on paper electronics can end up in the trash bin—ready for easy recycling. Here's to future phones rebuilt from yesterday's paper junk!

Researchers Develop First Paper Supercapacitor