Perseverance Rover, a NASA spacecraft, has successfully landed on Mars and began a two-year mission to look for evidence of prehistoric life and gather samples. Due to Mars’ extreme cold nighttime lows can reach -112 degrees Fahrenheit heaters are needed to prevent the rover’s battery system from freezing.
Researchers have now developed porous carbon aerogels that can be 3D printed for use as electrodes in ultralow-temperature supercapacitors, minimizing the need for heating for upcoming polar and space missions.
In order to reduce the weight and energy requirements of equipment and gear, such as the Mars rovers, Jennifer Lu, Yat Li, and colleagues set out to create an energy storage system that could function at extremely low temperatures without the use of heating units.
So the researchers used cellulose nanocrystal-based ink to 3D print a porous carbon aerogel, freeze-dry it, and then further modify the surface. The pore levels in the resultant material ranged from 500 nm pores in the lattice-like structure to nanometer-sized pores inside the lattice bars.
This multiscale porous network achieved better energy storage capacitance than previously reported low-temperature supercapacitors by preserving enough ion diffusion and charge transport via an electrode at -94 F. The team will work with NASA scientists to further analyze the performance of the device at low temperatures.
The Merced nAnomaterials Center for Energy and Sensing, NASA, the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the U.S. Department of Energy have all provided support to the authors.
