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C-MEMS Based Micro-Power: From Symmetric to Battery-Type Hybrid Microsupercapacitors

Tuesday, 21 June 2016
Riverside Center (Hyatt Regency)
R. Agrawal and C. Wang (Florida International University)
Given the rapid boom in development of miniaturized electronic devices, there has been an ever-increasing demand for high performance rechargeable micro-power devices. At the heart of micro-power are microsupercapacitors, which have great potential as standalone power devices or even replace microbatteries depending upon the application. Carbon microelectromechanical systems (C-MEMS) a technique, in which a patterned photoresist is pyrolyzed in order to produce carbon microelectrode platforms, has been proved to be a powerful approach for fabricating high-performance microsupercapacitors. The as-fabricated carbon electrodes can further be electrochemically activated or even decorated with different nanostructures as such carbon nanotubes, graphene or conducting polymers such as polypyrrole (PPy) in order to further enhance the electrochemical performance of the microsupercapacitors. In general, supercapacitors with identical anode and cathode are referred to as “symmetric” while the ones with different anode and cathode are referred to as “asymmetric” or colloquially as “hybrid”. The latter type of capacitor combining a faradaic type battery electrode and an electrochemical double layer type electrode has gained significant scientific interest in recent years. Intuitively such a capacitor would combine the benefits of the two very disparate electrodes, such as a wide operating potential, high power, high energy along with high cycle longevity. In previous works, our group has mostly focused on integrating nanostructures onto C-MEMS platforms for mostly symmetric microsupercapacitors and at present we are focusing on C-MEMS platforms for hybrid battery-type microsupercapacitors. Detailed works will be presented at the conference.