In addition to eating, what can popcorn do? In the laboratory of the College of Environmental Science and Engineering of Yangzhou University recently, Dr. Hou Jianhua’s team used popcorn to make a “super battery†that could be fully charged in 3 minutes and is expected to overcome electric vehicles. The development bottleneck of short mileage and long charging time. The inspiration for this invention came from questions raised by his daughter when she was eating popcorn. With the development of renewable clean energy, research on matching energy storage devices has also received increasing attention. Hou Jianhua said that as a new type of energy storage device, supercapacitors have gradually entered people’s lives due to their superior power density, stability, and long cycle life. Carbon materials have become the first choice for supercapacitor electrode materials due to their lower cost and ideal electrochemical performance. The limited capacity of traditional carbon materials such as porous carbon and activated carbon limits the application of electrochemical energy storage devices in real life, and also hinders the process of supercapacitors as the main power source. Therefore, it is necessary to regulate the microstructure and chemical composition of carbon materials to improve the electrochemical performance of carbon materials. It is understood that the existing control methods, such as hard template method, physical activation method, etc., can mostly only regulate a certain characteristic of porous carbon, and the operation is usually more complicated and the cost is higher. Committed to the development of a simple, green, scalable method, the precise design of the porous carbon structure to obtain high energy density and power density of the super capacitor, Hou Jianhua has become the direction of study. “Why popcorn is so crispy?†asked her once when her daughter had eaten popcorn, which inspired Hou Jianhua. He associates changes from corn to popcorn's microstructure. “Popcorn has a porous honeycomb structure. Can we use popcorn as a super capacitor material to store energy?†Today, Hou Jianhua and his team prepared a popcorn-based porous carbon sheet with a “ultra-high†specific surface area honeycomb nanosheet structure, and obtained a supercapacitor device with the highest energy density among biomass carbon materials. How does popcorn store energy? Hou Jianhua said that corn is transformed into fluffy popcorn with microwave radiation in 2 minutes. The volume of popcorn is more than 25 times larger than that of corn granules. This explosion process forms a honeycomb structure and further microwave carbonization. The derived porous carbon nanosheets can be obtained later. "The popcorn honeycomb structure has an ultra-high specific surface area and a perfect pore size. A small piece of material can store a large amount of electricity into its nano-sheet porous interior, greatly improving the storage capacity of super batteries," said Hou Jianhua. It is understood that the energy density of popcorn-based batteries is the highest value reported for biomass-derived carbon materials. The experimental results show that the super battery made with popcorn can be fully charged within 3 minutes, and the capacity after 10,000 charge and discharge is still greater than 95%, and it is highly expected to overcome the development bottleneck of the electric vehicle with short mileage and long charging time and meet the electric The urgent need for vehicles is the main power source. In addition to popcorn, Dr. Hou Jianhua also used other “green materials†for the production of supercapacitors, such as lanterns, tofu, rice, and fritters, especially in combination with the intrinsic void structure of crop stalks. According to reports, these materials and popcorn have the same principle, such as lanterns, are not open when small, fluffy up after opening, a small hole space can store electricity, and this is a very Chinese element Technology. At present, this research result is published in the International Academic Journal of ACS Applied Materials and Interfaces. The research work also received support from the National Natural Science Youth Fund, the Provincial Natural Science Youth Fund, and the University Student Science and Technology Innovation Fund. Guangdong Jia Mei Biological Technology Co.Ltd , https://www.jaymeimask.com