Battery Power by Women in the News
The way we use energy in the future will be ruled by our ability to store it. Batteries are an old technology with a lot of room for growth. Here's an article about a very unique way to look at energy storage:
TXCHNOLOGIST
SPONSORED BY GE
New Spray-On Battery Could Power Houses, Vehicles
Lithium-ion batteries are so 1991. Sure they can be recharged and sport impressive energy densities, but who wants to be shackled to their cumbersome rectangular or cylindrical design? Rather than constraining a device’s form because of battery size limitations, wouldn’t it be liberating to turn virtually any surface into an instant battery with the wave of a spray gun? This was the thinking of the research team who developed just such a trick—the world’s first paintable battery.
“Spray-painting allows us to convert any object you see in your home or any outside surface and build a battery on that,” says Neelam Singh, a mechanical engineering and material science graduate student at Rice University.
Singh and her colleagues mimicked a traditional Li-ion battery’s composition, which includes individual layers of thin metal coated with different active chemicals. In a normal battery, those layers are wrapped around one another and put in a canister. Singh figured the same principle should apply if the layers were painted onto a surface, so she got to work developing and testing spray paint versions of a normal battery’s cathode, anode, current collectors and polymer separator.
After tweaking the various formulas to make sure they would stick to whatever surface they were sprayed on, Singh and her colleagues got creative. They airbrushed batteries onto ceramic bathroom tiles, flexible pieces of plastic, glass, stainless steel and a beer stein.
In one experiment, they connected nine spray-battery-coated bathroom tiles and topped the arrangement with a small solar cell. After the solar panel had fully charged the battery tiles, they powered a set of lights that spelled “RICE” for six hours at a steady output of 2.4 volts. All of the various painted-battery devices performed consistently within 10 percent of the target capacity. They also withstood 60 charge-discharge cycles with only a small drop in capacity.
As we move into the future of energy we need to embrace all aspects of power usage and storage. This is a great way to think about Battery Power and how to use it.
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