Researchers develop bendable battery (AP)

[Feed]

AP - It's a battery that looks like a piece of paper and can be bent or twisted, trimmed with scissors or molded into any shape needed. While the battery is only a prototype a few inches square right now, the researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute who developed it have high hopes for it in electronics and other fields that need smaller, lighter power sources. More... WASHINGTON - It's a battery that looks like a piece of paper and can be bent or twisted, trimmed with scissors or molded into any shape needed. While the battery is only a prototype a few inches square right now, the researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute who developed it have high hopes for it in electronics and other fields that need smaller, lighter power sources. "We would like to scale this up to the point where you can imagine printing batteries like a newspaper. That would be the ultimate," Robert Linhardt a professor at the Center for Biotechnology and Interdisciplinary Studies at RPI said in a telephone interview. The development is reported in this week's online edition of Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Unlike other batteries, Linhardt explained, it is an integrated device, not a combination of pieces. The battery uses paper infused with an electrolyte and carbon nanotubes that are embedded in the paper. The carbon nanotubes form the electrodes, the paper is the separator and the electrolyte allows the current to flow. Students at the school in Troy, N.Y., were the inspiration for the work, said Linhardt, whose students were working on methods to dissolve paper and cast it into membranes for use in dialysis machines. Meanwhile, students of Pulickel Ajayan in RPI's materials science department were trying to make carbon nanotube composites using polymers. The two groups got together and realized they could use paper instead of polymers and combine the two projects. Then came Omkaram Nalamasu's students, also at RPI, who said the project — a thin sheet black on one side and white on the other — looked like an electrical device. And over about 18 months, the groups developed the projects, into a battery, a capacitor, which stores electricity and a combination of the two. Ajayan sees potential uses in combination with solar cells, perhaps layers of the paper batteries that could store the electricity generated until it is needed, he said in a telephone interview. Perhaps it could be scaled up and shaped into something like a car door, offering moving electrical storage and power when needed. That might be an expensive proposition, however, cautioned Peter Kofinas, an engineering professor at the University of Maryland. "The advantage of a flexible device would be that you could roll it in a film or a sheet. However, carbon nanotubes are very expensive," said Kofinas, who was not involved in the research. "So from the commercial standpoint, this would be very expensive if you want to make a large sheet out of this material," he said via e-mail. In addition, he said, "It does not look like it performs better than currently available batteries and supercapacitors in the market." Because of its flexibility, however, it does have potential, Kofinas said. The research was funded by the New York State Office of Science, Technology and Academic Research and the National Science Foundation.

[King]

Awesome... Everything is shrinking but the batteries never did. The walkman was discman and now its a very high storage device such as an I-Phone or a mp3 player. All these devices needs the battery to work though and to cut the size down further they perhaps were looking at resizing everything but for battery. Now what with batteries going to be as paper thick and as small as a 1 ' x 1' it'll help the devices go further down in size. I can see a lot of battery related articles going down in size. Good stuff.

[living]

Awesome... Everything is shrinking but the batteries never did. The walkman was discman and now its a very high storage device such as an I-Phone or a mp3 player. All these devices needs the battery to work though and to cut the size down further they perhaps were looking at resizing everything but for battery. Now what with batteries going to be as paper thick and as small as a 1 ' x 1' it'll help the devices go further down in size. I can see a lot of battery related articles going down in size. Good stuff.

Unless it has a unique way for quick recharge, there's no way its going to work for hi tech devices. These batteries won't be able to provide enough power :sad_smile:

[King]

Unless it has a unique way for quick recharge, there's no way its going to work for hi tech devices. These batteries won't be able to provide enough power :sad_smile:

That's right but is a right way ahead though. I haven't seen someone trying to work at shrinking the size of the batteries.

[living]

Physically its impossible to jam pack that much power. You need charge and charge itself has mass, this isn't going anywhere. I've been hearing about this stuff for a while now, and they realize sure enough after a while that practically this isn't going anywhere. Devices nowadays need MORE power to run. Unless some lucky bastard finds a way to utilize the heat produced by every single transistor in every device to fuel the device itself .. Oh yeah and I'm that lucky bastard :D

[Guest dada_rocks]

let me correct wrong notions coming from the article. they are talking about solar cells which essentially is a photodiode ( placed in rever-biassed mode). These only serve the purpose of converting solar eneregy into electrical energy as far as storage of that eneregy is concerned we still have to rely on those bulky batteries.. Even in terms of quantum effieicency these polymer (organic) photo-diodes lag too way behind the conventional solar cells. This is the story of non-printed ones those whichactually gets farbicated involving 100 degrees in clean rooms.. These printed organic photo-dioded in terms of quantum efficieny are far inferior than their clean-room counterpart let alone conventional solar-cell. This have been the situation since quite some time now.. To me it looks like another SOI like perennial future technology. If quantum efficiency improves (I don't see that happening anytime soon till somone comes up with new polymer because existing ones don't give me confidence) the beauty of these devices are that they are two-in-one OLED/OPD ( organic LED and organic photo-diode) at the same time so you might be able to have a curtain which stores energy during day and gives u light during night, no need of either elctrical connection or bulb.

[living]

^ exactly. And its a pretty simple concept. The implementation has always been hard - how do you store energy efficiently? People have tried timing capacitor circuits but the efficiency was too low.