Instead of ending
up in landfills, old tires can supply a key ingredient for
supercapacitors to
help power the nation.
(September 25, 2015) Some
of the 300 million tires discarded each year in the United States alone could
be used in supercapacitors for vehicles and the electric grid using a
technology developed at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National
Laboratory and Drexel University.
By employing proprietary pretreatment and processing, a team
led by Parans Paranthaman has created flexible polymer carbon composite films
as electrodes for supercapacitors. These devices are useful in applications for
cars, buses and forklifts that require rapid charge and discharge cycles with
high power and high energy density. Supercapacitors with this technology in
electrodes saw just a 2 percent drop after 10,000 charge/discharge cycles.
The technology, described in a paper published in
ChemSusChem by Wiley-VCH, follows an ORNL discovery of a method to use scrap
tires for batteries. Together, these approaches could provide some relief to
the problems associated with the 1.5 billion tires manufacturers expect to
produce annually by 2035.
“Those tires will eventually need to be discarded, and our
supercapacitor applications can consume several tons of this waste,”
Paranthaman said. “Combined with the technology we’ve licensed to two companies
to convert scrap tires into carbon powders for batteries, we estimate consuming
about 50 tons per day.”