New study suggests silk could be new “green” material for next-generation batteries

A new study suggests that silk could be the new "green" material for next-generation batteries.

Lithium-ion batteries are powering many of today's electronics, from portable gadgets to electric cars, but consumers need to frequently recharge these batteries to keep devices working.

But the American Chemical Society reports the development of a new, "green" way to boost the performance of the batteries with a material derived from silk.

According to Chuanbao Cao and colleagues carbon was a key component in commercial Li-ion energy storage devices including batteries,  supercapacitors and graphite mostly filled the role, but it had limited energy storage capacity.

To boost energy storage capacity, manufacturers had been looking for an alternative material which could replace graphite. Cao's team carried out research to  develop such a material using a sustainable source.

They devised a way to process natural silk to create carbon-based nanosheets that could potentially be used in energy storage devices.

Their material is capable of storing five times more lithium than graphite can, a capacity that was critical to improving battery performance. It also worked for over 10,000 cycles with only a 9 per cent loss in stability.

The researchers from Reseach Center of Materials Science, Beijing Institute of Technology had shown how the hierarchical porous nitrogen-doped carbon (HPNC) nanosheets could be prepared from simultaneous activation and graphitisation of biomass-derived natural silk.

The nanosheets exhibited features that showed potential for storing electrochemical energy.