The Electrochemical Society’s Chanyuan Liu, along with a team of University of Maryland researchers, believe they have developed a structure that could bring about the ultimate miniaturization of energy storage components.
The tiny structure, known as the nanopore, includes all the components of a battery and can be fully charged in 12 minutes and recharged thousands of times.
This from University of Maryland:
The structure is called a nanopore: a tiny hole in a ceramic sheet that holds electrolyte to carry the electrical charge between nanotube electrodes at either end. The existing device is a test, but the bitsy battery performs well.
Each nanopore is shaped exactly like the others, which allows the tiny batteries to be packed together efficient. The space inside the holes take up no more space than a grain of sand.
Researchers are now working on improvements that could make the next version 10 times more powerful. They hope to get the product ready for commercialization in the near future.
Liu, a Ph.D. student in materials science & engineering, is the first author of the published research. You can find it here in Nature Nanotechnology.
Read more of Liu’s research in ECS’s Digital Library and join her and other brilliant scientific minds by becoming an ECS member today!