A supercapacitor made with the new material could store more energy — improving regenerative brakes, power electronics and auxiliary power supplies.

This research has the potential to accelerate the development and optimization of carbon materials for supercapacitor applications. Although this breakthrough study used the best data at the time, scientists now have even more boundary data for training the machine learning model for the next study.

"By combining a data-driven method and our research experience, we created a carbon material with enhanced physicochemical and electrochemical properties that pushed the boundary of energy storage for carbon supercapacitors to the next level," said chemist Tao Wang of ORNL and the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.