IIT Mandi researchers develop easily rechargeable smart batteries

Energy is a must in today’s life. We cannot imagine our world without it. The need of energy has been increasing day by day. To combat the growing hunger of energy, we are always trying our best to evolve some new technology that can meet our demends. We have developed some ways that can help us in our growing need of energy supply.

The invention of the batteries is one such which keeps us going always without any worry of supply of energy. However, the batteries are not enough to keep on serving as they have their own limitations like they need to be recharged, they are not much durable etc.

It is full of hassles when it comes to charging batteries. Well, we are about to get a permanent solution to this. The researchers at IIT Mandi have developed a battery that is able to store large amounts of energy, can be charged rapidly and repeatedly. The battery is made up of lithium-ion which is commonly used in powering almost all our devices that run on battery.

The researchers at IIT Mandi have developed aligned carbon nanotube-based electrodes that could enable high energy supercapacitors. A supercapacitor consists of two conducting electrodes immersed in an electrolyte which are separated by an electrically insulating layer to separate the charges. Supercapacitors can charge and discharge instantly and last across millions of charge-discharge cycles without any down time in their performance. The research team includes Viswanath Balakrishnan, Associate Professor, School of Engineering, and a research scholar Piyush Avasthi.

Viswanath Balakrishnan, Associate Professor, School of Engineering said, “A promising route to improving the performance of energy storage devices, especially in terms of cycling life and charging times, is to move away from batteries towards supercapacitors.” The research papers have been published in Advanced Materials Interfaces and ACS Applied Nanomaterials.