Upcycling plastic waste toward sustainable energy storage
Simple process transforms PET plastic into a nanomaterial for energy
storage

Date:
August 12, 2020
Source:
University of California - Riverside
Summary:
Engineering professors and their students have been working
for years on creating improved energy storage materials from
sustainable sources, such as glass bottles, beach sand, Silly Putty,
and portabella mushrooms. Now they have turned plastic soda bottles
into a nanomaterial for use in batteries. Though they don't store
as much energy as lithium-ion batteries, supercapacitors made with
the material can charge much faster.



FULL STORY ==========================================================================
What if you could solve two of Earth's biggest problems in one stroke? UC Riverside engineers have developed a way to recycle plastic waste, such
as soda or water bottles, into a nanomaterial useful for energy storage.


========================================================================== Mihri and Cengiz Ozkan and their students have been working for years on creating improved energy storage materials from sustainable sources, such
as glass bottles, beach sand, Silly Putty, and portabella mushrooms. Their latest success could reduce plastic pollution and hasten the transition
to 100% clean energy.

"Thirty percent of the global car fleet is expected to be electric by
2040, and high cost of raw battery materials is a challenge," said Mihri
Ozkan, a professor of electrical engineering in UCR's Marlan and Rosemary Bourns College of Engineering. "Using waste from landfill and upcycling
plastic bottles could lower the total cost of batteries while making the battery production sustainable on top of eliminating plastic pollution worldwide." In an open-access article published in Energy Storage, the researchers describe a sustainable, straightforward process for upcycling polyethylene terephthalate plastic waste, or PET, found in soda bottles
and many other consumer products, into a porous carbon nanostructure.

They first dissolved pieces of PET plastic bottles in a solvent. Then,
using a process called electrospinning, they fabricated microscopic fibers
from the polymer and carbonized the plastic threads in a furnace. After
mixing with a binder and a conductive agent, the material was then dried
and assembled into an electric double-layer supercapacitor within a
coin-cell type format.

When tested in the supercapacitor, the material contained the
characteristics of both a double-layer capacitor formed by the arrangement
of separated ionic and electronic charges, as well as redox reaction pseudo-capacitance that occurs when the ions are electrochemically
absorbed onto surfaces of materials.

Though they don't store as much energy as lithium-ion batteries, these supercapacitors can charge much faster, making batteries based on plastic
waste a good option for many applications.

By "doping" the electrospun fibers prior to carbonization with various chemicals and minerals such as boron, nitrogen, and phosphorus, the team
plans to tune the final material to have improved electrical properties.

"At UCR, we have taken the first steps toward recycling plastic waste into
a rechargeable energy storage device," said doctoral student and first
author Arash Mirjalili. "We believe that this work has environmental
and economic advantages and our approach can present opportunities for
future research and development." The authors believe the process is
scalable and marketable, and that it represents major progress toward
keeping waste PET out of landfills and the oceans.

"The upcycling of PET plastic waste for energy storage applications
could be considered the holy grail for green manufacturing of electrode materials from sustainable waste sources," said mechanical engineering professor Cengiz Ozkan.

"This demonstration of a new class of electrodes in the making of supercapacitors will be followed by a new generation of Li-ion batteries
in the future, so stay tuned."

========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by
University_of_California_-_Riverside. Original written by Holly
Ober. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.


========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. Arash Mirjalili, Bo Dong, Pedro Pena, Cengiz S. Ozkan, Mihrimah
Ozkan.

Upcycling of Polyethylene Terephthalate Plastic Waste to Microporous
Carbon Structure for Energy Storage. Energy Storage, 2020; DOI:
10.1002/ est2.201 ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/08/200812115322.htm

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