{"id":9442,"date":"2014-11-12T09:17:38","date_gmt":"2014-11-12T16:17:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cafe.foundation\/blog\/?p=9442"},"modified":"2014-11-12T09:17:38","modified_gmt":"2014-11-12T16:17:38","slug":"billion-hole-battery","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/cafe.foundation\/blog\/billion-hole-battery\/","title":{"rendered":"A Billion-Hole Battery"},"content":{"rendered":"

Battery companies and academic researchers keep finding ways to make ions flow quickly and efficiently within batteries. One way is to reduce the size of a cell so that the ions don\u2019t have to travel far.\u00a0 University of Maryland researchers may have achieved a miniaturization that boggles the mind.<\/span><\/p>\n

Their claim, that they’ve created a \u201csingle tiny structure that includes all the components of a battery that they say could bring about the ultimate miniaturization of energy storage components, comes from a story by Martha Heil in UMD Right Now<\/i><\/a>.<\/p>\n

https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=vJ1JeFtU-Xw<\/p>\n

The structure is based on a nanopore, an incredibly tiny hole in a ceramic sheet 80,000 times thinner than a human hair.\u00a0 The holes can hold electrolyte that carries a charge between the top and bottom surfaces of the ceramic sheet.\u00a0 Millions of these holes poked through a postage stamp-sized sheet comprise a battery.\u00a0 Researchers think the uniformity of the holes allows them to be packed tightly and efficiently together.\u00a0 Even more astonishing, the space inside the millions of holes, according to UMD, \u201cis so small that the space they take up, all added together, would be no more than a grain of sand.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Holes<\/a>

Eleanor Gillette’s rendering of film, hole structure. \u00a0Holes form electrodes between top and bottom of film<\/p><\/div>\n

Coauthor Eleanor Gillette\u2019s modeling shows that the unique design of the nanopore battery is responsible for its success.<\/p>\n

According to the report, the postage stamp performs well.\u00a0 Chanyuan Liu, a Ph.D. student in materials science & engineering, reports it can be fully charged in 12 minutes and recharged thousands of times.<\/p>\n

Having demonstrated the concept, researchers are now working on improvements that will make the next version 10 times more powerful.\u00a0 At that point, the batteries may be able to be manufactured in large batches, making commercialization a possibility.<\/p>\n

Now that the scientists have the battery working and have demonstrated the concept, they have also identified improvements that could make the next version 10 times more powerful. The next step to commercialization: the inventors have conceived strategies for manufacturing the battery in large batches.<\/p>\n

The research was funded by the Department of Energy.<\/p>\n

Gary Rubloff<\/a>, director of the\u00a0Maryland NanoCenter<\/a>\u00a0and a professor in the\u00a0Department of Materials Science and Engineering\u00a0and the\u00a0Institute for Systems Research;\u00a0Sang Bok Lee<\/a>, a professor in the\u00a0Department of Chemistry and Biochemisty<\/a>\u00a0and the Department of Materials Science and Engineering; and seven of their Ph.D. students contributed to the research and the resulting paper, published in the journal Nature Nanotechnology<\/em><\/a>.\u00a0 Students include Chanyuan Liu, Eleanor I. Gillette, Xinyi Chen, Alexander J. Pearse, Alexander C. Kozen, Marshall A. Schroeder, and Keith E. Gregorczyk.<\/p>\n

The abstract for the paper gives more detail on what they managed to cram into those holes.<\/p>\n

\"Nanopores<\/a>

Nanopores show remarkable similarity in size, considering nanoscale in which they exist<\/p><\/div>\n

A single nanopore structure that embeds all components of an electrochemical storage device could bring about the ultimate miniaturization in energy storage. Self-alignment of electrodes within each nanopore may enable closer and more controlled spacing between electrodes than in state-of-art batteries. Such an \u2018all-in-one\u2019 nanopore battery array would also present an alternative to interdigitated electrode structures that employ complex three-dimensional geometries with greater spatial heterogeneity. Here, we report a battery composed of an array of nanobatteries connected in parallel, each composed of an anode, a cathode and a liquid electrolyte confined within the nanopores of anodic aluminium oxide, as an all-in-one nanosize device. Each nanoelectrode includes an outer Ru nanotube current collector and an inner nanotube of V2<\/sub>O5<\/sub>\u00a0storage material, forming a symmetric full nanopore storage cell with anode and cathode separated by an electrolyte region. The V2<\/sub>O5<\/sub>\u00a0is prelithiated at one end to serve as the anode, with pristine V2<\/sub>O5<\/sub>\u00a0at the other end serving as the cathode, forming a battery that is asymmetrically cycled between 0.2\u2005V and 1.8\u2005V. The capacity retention of this full cell (relative to 1\u2005C values) is 95% at 5\u2005C and 46% at 150\u2005C, with a 1,000-cycle life. From a fundamental point of view, our all-in-one nanopore battery array unveils an electrochemical regime in which ion insertion and surface charge mechanisms for energy storage become indistinguishable, and offers a testbed for studying ion transport limits in dense nanostructured electrode arrays.<\/i><\/p>\n

Editor\u2019s Note: The use of Ru (Ruthenium) nanotubes might make the battery somewhat pricey (Ru hovers around $60 per troy ounce), but then again, the extremely small size of each component in the battery would keep such costs low.<\/p>\n

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