Overview
- University of Kentucky chemists say they converted bourbon distillery stillage, a watery grain waste, into carbon electrodes and built working supercapacitors with performance on par with commercial models.
- The group reported the results at an American Chemical Society meeting in Atlanta, describing lab devices that used stillage-derived materials in coin-size test cells.
- The process used hydrothermal carbonization in a 10‑liter reactor to make a carbon powder, then produced hard carbon by heating to about 392°F and activated carbon by adding potassium hydroxide and heating to about 1,472°F.
- In tests, devices reached up to 48 watt-hours per kilogram, and a hybrid design that paired hard carbon with activated carbon beat some commercial options by roughly 25 percent.
- Stillage volumes run six to ten times the amount of bourbon produced and are pricey to dry or move, so turning it into energy parts could reduce waste burdens, though the team says scale-up and full economic and lifecycle reviews still lie ahead.