Your Next Battery Could Have Peanut Shells As Power Suppliers – Evidently They Can Work As Powerful Hybrid Ion Capacitors

A group of scientists in Canada have managed to create a hybrid sodium ion capacitor (NIC) from peanut shells. They claim to have blurred the lines between conventional ion batteries and super-capacitors, thereby offering a much better way to store and deliver electrical power.

The struggle to get more out of the ubiquitous battery has been a long drawn one. Scientists have always attempted to fine tune multiple aspects of the battery to get more juice and make the batteries last longer as well as cram in more juice within a tiny frame. This time, scientists have attempted to select new materials that offer such benefits and settled on peanut shells, reported Chemistry World.

In essence, the scientists have managed to create a hybrid ion capacitor using peanut shells. A hybrid ion capacitor is capable of storing charge both electrostatically and electrochemically. It is an intermediate solution between energy and power and between traditional batteries and super-capacitors.

Explaining the concept, David Mitlin, from the University of Alberta, who led the research, said, “In conventional batteries the cathode often limits performance and so what people are starting to do is swap regular cathodes for super-capacitor cathodes. These cathodes can drastically improve the cycling life of such devices. Ions are adsorbed onto the surface of the cathode in an NIC, which avoids the degradation seen in batteries due to ion absorption into the bulk. A high surface area cathode material is therefore crucial for achieving energy–power performance to rival other state-of-the-art energy storage devices.”

The usage of peanut shells offers multitude of benefits, the most prominent being easy availability in abundance. Mitlin said they are quite easy to source, extremely cheap, and have almost no commercial use. Peanut shells mostly end up in landfill sites, causing a strain on such locations.

However, zeroing on the material wasn’t random. The typical shape of the peanut shell played a decisive role. The team identified important structural characteristics of both the inner and outer peanut shells to give desirable anode and cathode materials, respectively. While it is a bit complex to explain the benefits the shape of peanut shell offers, in essence the anode and cathode part of a battery were of quite high quality and potency.

Once optimized, the peanut shell batteries achieved 88 percent capacity retention after 100,000 cycles at 51.2A/g. In other words, not only will batteries made out of peanut shells be extremely cheap, they will be powerful and will be able to retain their potency even after thousands of charge-discharge cycles. Though commercial viability of the concept may take some time, in the near future, our batteries could be powered by peanut shells.

[Image Credit | Chemistry World, Argonne National Laboratory]