Sooner or later we will simply wear some form of battery fiber that works to provide power. Provided of course that we actually need batteries. It is becoming that dicey. However been able to use all that wiring as a natural battery is attractive and worth some effort.
Beyond all that, it is
not obvious yet, but I suspect that our civilization is likely to
dewire generally long before this actually comes on stream. Thus it
is likely to remain a commercial long shot even if knowing how is
helpful on compact hardware.
This is all good and
neat.
Researchers create flexible wires that could double as batteries
June
4, 2014
We
literally live in a wired world, with wires snaking hither and yon
transmitting electricity and data. Many are visible, while many more
are hidden in the walls of buildings, the panels of cars, and the
fuselage of aircraft. Now, imagine; what if we were able to turn each
and every one of these into a battery that not only transmitted
electricity but stored it too? Well, two researchers from the
University of Central Florida (UCF) imagined that too, and came up
with a way to use nano-technology to make wires with supercapacitance
that may eventually also double as batteries.
Professor
Jayan Thomas and his Ph.D. student Zenan Yu premised their design on
their ability to grow "nanowhiskers" of copper oxide in a
laboratory that would provide the conductive link between between the
inner and outer layers of their supercapacitor wire.
The
team first started by growing a layer of nanowhiskers from insulating
copper oxide on an outer layer of a single copper wire. They then
treated those whiskers with a gold-palladium alloy, before finally
depositing an electrochemically active coating of manganese oxide on
the alloy. As a result, the nanowires acted as a sheath to
encapsulate the copper wire, and form the first electrode.
To
add a second electrode to complete the energy storage device, the
researchers coated the first electrode with a solid electrolyte and a
polymer partition, and then fitted another cylindrical electrode
around that. The second electrode was then formed in the same way as
the first electrode, but nanowhiskers were molded on a copper foil
that acted as the final conducting tube around the outside.
The
practical upshot of this is that this wire – in a growing line of
otherwearable
supercapacitors and weavable
battery wires –
may soon help make possible energy-storage devices and systems that
are flexible, wearable and incorporated directly into clothing and
textiles.
Light,
bendable supercapacitor cables might also assist in making electronic
devices even smaller and more portable than they are today, by vastly
decreasing the size of batteries, or incorporating energy-storage
wires throughout the device to replace the batteries altogether.
While
more work is required, the technique the team used to grow the
nanowhiskers should be transferable to other types of materials. The
use of copper wire is only the beginning; it is envisioned that, as
the technology progresses, other fibers and cables could be developed
with similar nanostructures that also both transfer and store energy.
No comments:
Post a Comment