Storing Energy in Biodegradable Electrochemical Supercapacitors

TL;DR

This paper proposes a biodegradable supercapacitor using peptide electrodes and amino acid ionic liquid electrolyte, demonstrating significantly higher energy storage capacity than traditional metallic-electrode supercapacitors, with potential biomedical applications.

Contribution

It introduces a novel biodegradable supercapacitor design with peptide electrodes and amino acid ionic liquid electrolyte, showing enhanced energy storage capabilities.

Findings

Energy capacity nearly 20 times greater than metallic-electrode supercapacitors.

Potential for use in biomedical applications due to biodegradability and biocompatibility.

Superior performance demonstrated through molecular dynamics simulations.

Abstract

The development of green and biodegradable electrical components is one of the main fronts of research to overcome the growing ecological problem related to the issue of electronic waste. At the same time, such devices are highly desirable in biomedical applications such as integrated bio-electronics, for which biocompatibility is also required. Supercapacitors for storage of electrochemical energy, designed only with bio-degradable organic matter would contemplate both aspects, that is, they would be ecologically harmless after their service lifetime and would be an important component for applications in biomedical engineering. By means of atomistic simulations of molecular dynamics we propose a supercapacitor whose electrodes are formed exclusively by self-organizing peptides and whose electrolyte is a green amino acid ionic liquid. Our results indicate that this supercapacitor has a high potential for energy storage with superior performance than conventional supercapacitors. In particular its capacity to store energy was estimated to be almost 20 times greater than an analogue one of planar metallic electrodes.