Quantachrome's Director of Applied Science, Dr. Matthias Thommes, and Staff Scientist, Dr. Katie Cychosz, contributed their expertise in porous materials characterization to the collaborative work by the University of Texas and Brookhaven National Laboratory that led to the development of a novel micro-mesoporous carbon material, described as exfoliated graphene oxide.

Thommes and Cychosz (above, shown with some of their pore size data) are co-authors of a paper announcing the work published just this month (online) by Science magazine entitled Carbon-Based Supercapacitors Produced by Activation of Graphene by Yanwu Zhu, Shanthi Murali, Meryl D. Stoller, K. J. Ganesh, Weiwei Cai, Paulo J. Ferreira, Adam Pirkle, Robert M. Wallace, Katie A. Cychosz, Matthias Thommes, Dong Su, Eric A. Stach and Rodney S. Ruoff. Science, 12 May 2011 DOI: 10.1126/science.1200770

The new porous, three-dimensional carbon can, according to the group led by Professor Rodney S. Ruoff at the University of Texas at Austin's Cockrell School of Engineering, be used as a greatly enhanced supercapacitor, and thus shows promise for many energy storage uses. This new material can be described as an "electrical charge storage sponge" based on its continuous 3-D network of pores with walls just one atom thick. The material's BET surface area was reported as up to 3100 square meters per gram (greatly increased over typical activated carbons' 1000-2000 m2/g), and pores primarily 0.6- to 5-nm wide.