In February 2019, Alternet Systems hired David Mitlin, a professor at New York’s Clarkson University who has been researching hemp for energy storage for years.
Mitlin’s research uses hemp bast, the bark of the hemp plant and a waste product during hemp production, as a replacement for graphene, a much more expensive material, in supercapacitors.
Because of its strength and light weight, manufacturers use graphene, a material composed of an atom-thick layer of carbon, to create nanosheets for capacitor electrodes.
However, it’s quite expensive.
The hemp bast Mitlin uses is much cheaper than graphene and, on top of that, Mitlin says their hemp supercapacitors have been able to store 12 watt-hours of energy per kilogram – over 2x as high as conventional supercapacitors.
More here ↙️ https://ihempwa.org/batteries/