UCSD - University of California - San Diego

08/20/2026 | Press release | Distributed by Public on 08/20/2026 17:09

This Thin Device Can Store Energy, Strengthen Structures and Be Recycled

Published Date

August 20, 2026

Article Content

Engineers at the University of California San Diego have developed a new type of supercapacitor that can do more than store electricity - it can also provide structural support and be quickly disassembled into reusable parts. The advance was published in ACS Energy Letters.

The device, known as a structural supercapacitor, could offer a more sustainable approach to energy storage for lightweight electric vehicles and other applications where weight and space are important. Researchers led by Tse Nga (Tina) Ng, professor in the Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the UC San Diego Jacobs School of Engineering, demonstrated the concept by building four supercapacitors into the wings of a miniature glider. The devices helped stiffen the wings while also supplying power to the glider's propeller.

When the glider was tossed like a paper airplane, it traveled 12 feet when the propeller's motor was powered by the supercapacitors, compared to 8 feet when the motor was turned off.

The researchers also designed the supercapacitor to be easy to recycle. Many supercapacitors and other rechargeable devices typically contain materials that are difficult to separate at the end of their useful lives. The new structural supercapacitor instead uses materials that allow its layers to be easily separated and reused.

The new device builds on the team's previous work developing structural supercapacitors that combine high electrochemical performance with mechanical strength. Now, the researchers have added recyclability without sacrificing the device's performance.

"Sustainability and performance do not have to be competing goals," said study first author Nandu Koripally, an electrical and computer engineering PhD student in Ng's research group. "By considering the full material life cycle, we can combine design requirements into one solution to make structural energy storage devices that maintain high performance and are simple to repair and reuse."

Powered by supercapacitors, a mini glider takes brief flight.

The supercapacitor consists of an anode layer made of zinc metal and copper foil, and a cathode layer made of carbon-fiber. Between them is a solid electrolyte layer made from a porous resin coated onto a plastic film and soaked in a salt solution. When heated, the resin forms strong bonds, which fuses the layers together. The resin also breaks down when exposed to a mild, water-based acid.

Unlike conventional supercapacitors that use a flammable liquid electrolyte, the one that Ng, Koripally and colleagues built uses a water-based electrolyte containing zinc ions, making it more environmentally friendly than lithium-ion technologies.

To test recyclability, the researchers soaked one of the supercapacitors in a mildly acidic solution. Within 30 minutes, the acid broke apart the resin in the solid electrolyte layer. This allowed the anode and cathode layers to separate. The researchers then recovered the carbon-fiber cathode and reused it twice. Each time, they created a new supercapacitor by pairing the recovered cathode with a fresh solid electrolyte and zinc anode. The recycled supercapacitors performed similarly to the originals.

From initial fabrication through two rounds of recycling, the carbon-fiber cathode completed more than 172,000 charge-discharge cycles while maintaining similar electrical performance.

There is still more work to be done to improve the technology, but the research demonstrates a new approach for lightweight energy storage that could reduce electronic waste, Ng noted.

"There's a lot of potential for energy storage devices to do so much more," Ng said. "We've shown that they can become part of the structure itself. And with thoughtful engineering and material design, we can even build these devices so that valuable components can be recovered and reused rather than thrown away. It's another important step towards building a sustainable future."

Full study: "Recyclable Zinc Ion Structural Supercapacitor Enabled by Porous Vitrimer."

This work was supported by a National Defense Science and Engineering Graduate Fellowship, the Naval Innovation Science Engineering Center, and the National Science Foundation (CNS-2312715). This work was performed in part at the San Diego Nanotechnology Infrastructure (SDNI) at UC San Diego, a member of the National Nanotechnology Coordinated Infrastructure, which is supported by the National Science Foundation (ECCS-2025752).

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