Brief Discussion of the Impact of Material and Supercapacitor Research in Malaysia

An email I received from Meisam from USM:

I would like to introduce myself, Meisam Valizadeh Kiamahalleh, as one of postgraduate student in Universiti Sains Malaysia(USM, Penang). Actually my research filed is supercapacitor materials based on CNTs and transition metal oxides nanocomposites. I am going to submit my research proposal but I don’t know how to write the section of Impact toward society and country due to not to be familiar with Malaysia too much.

According to be Malaysian having a lot of experiences in the same field of supercapacitor, would you please guide me how to write this section of my proposal?

I would be very grateful if you can help me in this case. Nice to know you.

Kindest Regards

Meisam Valizadeh Kiamahalleh

Dear Meisam,

It's a nice surprise to be receiving your email. Certainly, I can give an idea or two about the impact of the research on Malaysian society and technological development, however, I must say that having been overseas for the past 8 years, Malaysia has progressed in many different ways (during my absence) in the advancement of her science and technology fields with various research funding being poured extensively by MOSTI and the Higher Education Ministry.

However, with the introduction and further advancement in material studies especially in the field of supercapacitor, a device which bridges the critical energy and power gap between battery/fuel cell and the conventional capacitor, issues which are of global concerns such as the climate change, green house effect and the scarce sources of fossil fuels can be addressed more effectively. Although this may not be the main concern of a developing country like Malaysia, this would certainly help raise awareness of the society towards environmental issues of such and the need to develop workable solutions.

Nonetheless, advancement in material technology would bring the development of supercapacitors into a new era especially with the investigations of nanomaterials which have attracted much attention of late due to their unique properties and in particular, in terms of supercapacitor where the surface utilisation and accessibility of the materials by the electrolytes for redox reactions to take place are the most important features in their storage mechanisms. This would put Malaysia on the right track in the government's objectives to develop world class research centres at our local universities. New understanding of the material especially those which are reported locally would improve the credibility of local research hence enable investigations to be done locally without having to rely on overseas partners. This would also stop the flow of local funds overseas.

Malaysia is a unique country where much of our research have been lagging behind most developed countries in the world even though we may have one of the best research facilities in our universities. This has been identified as one of the crucial challenges, i.e. to bring able knowledge into the country besides being able to produce Malaysian researches who would be able to come up with innovative if not original/novel research. Supercapacitor being one of the most recent fields which has grabbed much attention among the research community, especially in the area of power sources, electrochemical devices, renewable energy, and electrical/power engineering would certainly be an interesting field to be tapped by local universities in Malaysia. This may be an area worth focusing on in terms of being able to transform the local research into an leading one in the world (especially given that Universiti Sains Malaysia has just recently attained it's Apex University title).

Nonetheless, there is also a comprehensive report which has been compiled by the US department of energy on the state-of-the-art supercapacitors as in the Miller and Butler paper which was presented at the 12th International Seminar on supercapacitors. The priority research directions were clearly identified and if were to be used as guidelines would certainly lead to major improvements in this technology. Thus, this technology has very promising future in Malaysia given that the foundation has been carefully laid out by many researchers since the first patent was filed by Becker.

There would be other impacts on the country and society which I would like to discuss further, but I believe what I have written above would give you a good outline and basis on what to work on in your proposal.

Cheers,
KC

p.s. I hope you wouldn't mind me posting this on my webpage.