Queen’s University researchers have gained recognition for the discoveries they have made in medicine, engineering and the sciences, innovations that have improved the lives of people around the world. To make sure that the university and the public can continue to benefit from this work, Queen’s Partnerships and Innovation (QPI) promotes the discoveries of university researchers for the purposes of commercialization and whose work is ready for licensing and commercial application. QPI leads the commercialization processes, including the protection of the intellectual property, the creation of strategies to further its development, the search for funders, partners and licensees, the negotiation of terms, the management of relationships, the collection of licensing and royalty revenues, and disbursements to inventors.
Imagine a battery so small it could be built right in the wrist band of a smart watch – a battery that could also charge faster than a conventional battery. Or a power source so thin and flexible that it could be contained unnoticeably within the fabric of the coat, where it would power a heater that would keep the wearer warm for hours.
That’s what Queen’s University Professor Dominik Barz has developed. Much more than a battery, it is what Barz refers to as a supercapacitor-battery hybrid energy storage device. As a supercapacitor, it has the ability to take on an electrical charge quickly; as a battery, it can store this charge and then, release it more slowly. By combining both functions, the storage device might in the case of a heated ski jacket, for instance, recharge quickly when plugged in, but then power a heater that would keep the wearer warm for hours when moving around outside.
Dr. Barz, a chemical and a mechanical engineer, was originally interested in transport and interfacial phenomena – broadly the changes that occur when two different “phases,” a liquid and a solid for example, come together. But, he says, on joining the Queen’s Faculty of Engineering and Applied Science, “I slowly went into the battery business,” he says. “One of my students said we should do something like the vanadium redox flow battery without a flow. (Flow batteries work by storing electricity in tanks of liquid electrolyte. This is extracted by the fluids being pumped through electrodes.) As they worked, they experimented.
“I said we should use graphene as the electrode material,” says Barz. “We made something that wasn’t a redox battery, but we didn’t know that at the time. And it turned out to be better than a redox battery.”
This new device, when operated as a supercapacitor, retains 95% of the initial capacity over 1000 cycles, far higher than many other capacitors. Operating as a battery, that loss in initial capacity can be electrically regenerated, an outstanding feature compared to conventional batteries. That, combined with its compact size and mechanical flexibility, suggested any number of applications.
Dr. Barz’s work came to the attention of Queen’s Partnerships and Innovation (QPI). “We started working on this in 2018,” says Jason Hendry, Partnerships Development Officer at QPI who works with Barz. “What’s interesting about this technology is that we didn’t really see anything out there like it, so QPI’s patent team drafted and filed a patent application.”
That was 2019.
Potential end users have proven enthusiastic. Particularly in what is known as the wearables industry (these are the creators of jackets, sweaters and even long underwear that are heated electrically and can also feature sensors that monitor heart rate, activity sweat and so on.) But Barz and QPI face a major stumbling block. Citing the example of the wearables industry, Hendry says they can see the value of this new battery, but “They are not going to spend any of their resources designing new wearables that use this battery if they are not confident they are able to get it.”
To provide an end-user prototype is not something that Barz can do.
“We are an academic lab. And making a commercial battery, that’s totally different. The packaging, the casing, that takes expertise we don’t have.”
“We applied for and received funding from NSERC’s Idea to Innovation program,” says Hendry. The grant for $125,000 helped Barz and his team take the project past the level of pure research and closer to where it can be picked up commercially.
In the meantime, Barz and his group continue to work on their battery.
“We have done a number of different things,” he says. “We use graphene for our electrodes, and it turned out that by functionalizing them with simple atoms like hydrogen, nitrogen and sulphur, we got really good performance improvements. Right now, compared to our first prototype, we have probably four or five times more energy content. It’s getting really interesting for other applications, maybe for renewable energy, at least for short-term storage. Nowadays, if you have a lot of wind and produce a lot of electricity, if the electrical grid can’t take that up, then you just turn off the windmills.”
But his storage device could change that, thanks to its function as a supercapacitor.
“You could use it to as an intermediate buffer to collect electricity and then release it into the grid as needed.”
What QPI and Dr. Barz hope to do, says Hendry, is to take the technology and “find a receptor company or a group of entrepreneurs who would be interested in forming a startup around it. Either approach is suitable for us.”
“We know we’ve got a unique technology, there are customers who have expressed an interest in it,” he says. “We just need to find the right people to move it forward.”
Readers interested in licensing or learning more about Dr. Barz’s technology, should visit the Queen's technology information page and contact Jason Hendry at jason.hendry@queensu.ca.