Silk improves battery performance

Scientists have developed a new, ‘green’ way to boost the performance of lithium-ion batteries - with a material derived from silk.

Researchers note that carbon is a key component in commercial Li-ion energy storage devices including batteries and supercapacitors. Most commonly, graphite fills that role, but it has a limited energy capacity. To improve the energy storage, manufacturers are looking for an alternative material to replace graphite. Researcher Chuanbao Cao’s team wanted to see if they could develop such a material using a sustainable source. Cao and his colleagues’ findings have been reported in the journal ACS Nano.

The researchers found a way to process natural silk to create carbon-based nanosheets that could potentially be used in energy storage devices. Their material stores five times more lithium than graphite can - a capacity that is critical to improving battery performance. It also worked for over 10,000 cycles with only a 9% loss in stability. The researchers successfully incorporated their material in prototype batteries and supercapacitors in a one-step method that could easily be scaled up. The authors acknowledge funding from the National Natural Science Foundation of China.