Achievement

John Chmiola, an alumnus of the Drexel/Penn IGERT Traineeship in Nanoscale Science & Engineering, has published his second paper as first author in Science on April 22, 2010 (www.sciencemag.org - J. Chmiola, C. Largeot, P.-L. Taberna, P. Simon, and Y. Gogotsi, "Monolithic carbide-derived carbon films for micro-supercapacitors"). The paper is based on Chmiola's PhD research and describes a new method of producing supercapacitors that doubles their performance over similar devices reported thus far. The research also presents an opportunity for integrating supercapacitors with electronic devices such as cell phones and laptop computers. Previous studies by this group used porous carbon called carbide derived carbon (CDC) in powdered form as the electrode material. The innovation reported here is the use of monolithic "bulk" films with no macroporosity.