Today there is an urgent need for a high-efficiency device that can store electric energy for various applications such as car batteries consumer electronics batteries and so on. For these applications and others there is always a tradeoff between power and size - a bigger battery may give more power but also occupies more space. Supercapacitors are electrical devices used to store electric energy; however these are still far from optimized in terms of energy versus size and nowhere near some commercially available alternatives. For example electric and hybrid cars would greatly benefit from a battery with energy density near that of gasoline but current supercapacitors are inadequate.
1) Energy density two orders of magnitude higher than conventional capacitors 2) Allows for smaller lighter batteries 3) Energy storage: 2x105 Joules/Liter (gasoline has 5.8 x105 J/L and todays supercapacitors have 2000 J/L)