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A Non-Toxic, Paper Battery / Supercapacitor
jcr writes "Researchers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute have developed a combination battery/capacitor by infusing carbon nanotubes and electrolytes into a paper substrate. The material can be folded, rolled up, or molded to any convenient shape with no effect on power capacity. Operating temperature range is -100 to 300 degrees F. One of the co-authors is quoted: 'We're not putting pieces together — it's a single, integrated device. The components are molecularly attached to each other: the carbon nanotube print is embedded in the paper, and the electrolyte is soaked into the paper. The end result is a device that looks, feels, and weighs the same as paper.'" The researchers haven't yet developed a high-volume way to manufacture the devices. They envision ultimately printing sheets between rollers like newsprint.
Instead of a paper-cut you get a electric paper-shock?
I wonder how hard nanotubes are to create. Are they totally unnatural and that's why we don't see exactly this sort of thing in nature?
Now it would be interesting, so far power supply for e-ink was big and bulky. There is already a technology of printing ICs on paper, meaning - electronic paper is at hand's reach.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Hi,
Just as an alternative ultracapacitor this sounds interesting: I'm going hunting for the efficiency numbers above, though they're going to be hard to gauge at this stage I guess!
Rgds
Damon
http://m.earth.org.uk/
Like the sound of an mp3 player getting a paper jam.
They combust at Farenheit 451
Donte Alistair Anderson Roberts - hi son!
Karma: Chameleon
Come on? What's the volt/amp specs per square inch? "Oh we got a paper-thin battery that's flexible" is all fair and good, but until we get full specs on it, we can't plan on replacing our iPhones any time soon with Earth: Final Conflict style devices.
--
# Canmephians for a better Linux Kernel
$Stalag99{"URL"}="http://stalag99.net";
As an aside, announcements of technologies such as this are becoming more frequent. As Alvin Toffler was talking about many years ago, we have entered the period of "Future Shock". Development and change in general is undergoing a period doubling. Not only are these new technologies amazing, but also the technologies they enable will also be amazing. So it begs the question: what do we - as a species - want to do? Because unless a mass extinction occurs we will probably be able to choose from an unimaginable menu of options about fifty years from now.
Shh.
thats -73.3 C to 148.8 C.
<\karma whore>
FGD 135
Of great importance
/discharging characteristics ? Milliamp or amp hour power capacity versus its geometry / dimensions ?
What is it's capacitance versus its geometry?
I have a capacitor too, its called 2 pieces of metal separated by a distance
I want to know the capacitance of this new thing, Only then can we deem it great .
What are the dimensions of a 1 farad capacitor made of this stuff,?
a 100 microfarad capacitor made of this stuff, 1000 and , 10,000 Microfarads ?
Picofarad values ?
Voltage breakdown / handling .
temperature stability ? long term storage problems?
Then and only do we really have somwething useful as a capacitor , oterwise it's just trivial
Is this a usable capacitor ?
Also storage
It isn't enough to be battery , what are its charging
the above answer the question Is it useful ?
or just hype AH- boosta
It s not enough to look like duck, are we trapshooting wood decoys ?
Should I invest money in this?
This is a pointless announcement. Anybody can make a capacitor with two conducting surfaces separated by an insulator. A good, useful, and economical capacitor is something else. Questions like capacitance, capacitance per unit area, capacitance per unit volume, voltage rating, Q, stability, cost per unit, testability, long-term stability and reliability, manufacturability, testability, structural strength, vibration effects, electromigration, overvoltage resistance, pinhole noise, dielectric drift, leakage current, leakage drift, stray inductance, longevity, temperature range, polarization, memory effect, moisture resistance, solvent resistance, altitude effects, and more are significant parameters. A useful new capacitor design would have to have some significant advantages over current designs.
It's 90% paper, so from the sounds of it, it'll biodegrade pretty much like paper. Which doesn't seem so great if you want to start putting it in cars or aeroplanes. I can't help but be reminded of Larry Niven's Ringworld, where a bacteria [I think it was a bacteria] evolved to consume certain high-tech gear. So not only will our batteries have the lifetime of regular paper, but things that eat regular paper will be able to eat our batteries too.
Its a shame that, if its fate is typical of most amazing technological leaps we read about on Slashdot, we will in all probability never hear, see, or use anything relating to this wonderous bit of technology ever again (probably due to some issue the researchers new about when they made the announcement, but decided to gloss over in rush to attract funding).
I'm assuming since this is essentially a high tech capacitor it will probably withstand many more recharge cycles than a lithium ion or nickle metal hydride battery?
Power capacity. Keith Dawson, it's anything BUT that. Power capacity would be the ability to discharge. The poster is probably thinking of energy density. PLEASE READ THE SUBMISSIONS (and maybe try to understand them if you can) BEFORE YOU POST THEM ON THE FRONT PAGE.
It's a battery. It's a capacitor. It's the battacitor!
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I can't find the paper yet at pnas.org, and as usual, TFA is light on details. Where and how is the energy stored? Capacitance between individual nanotubes? Or between sides of the paper? Or a chemical process?
What happens when you fold the paper? Wouldn't you short-circuit it?
How well does the carbon adhere to the paper? Pencil strokes always flake off a bit over time.
Give me patience.... and give it to me NOW!!!
Free, as in your money being freed from the confines of your account.
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I can see Stephen King starting on a new novel ...
I see this all the time. A children's book stated that Hawaii lies 2,500 miles from the continental U.S. and helpfully converted it to 4,023 km. It continued that some people were surfing on 3-foot, or 91-centimeter, waves.
And look at this idiocy from NASA:
(Correct answers: 4,000 km, meter-high, 12,000 or 10,000 mph, 200 mph.)
Maybe use something other than paper. Have you ever seen paper that has been touched a lot over the course of a few years? It's not so pretty. Maybe the use of some polymer is in order.
The game.
In Soviet Russia, paper is made the size of batteries!
I will bend like a reed in the wind.
"Combined with some form of fusion, the machines had found all the power they would ever need
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
It's bad enough we've got politicians and pundits hyperventilating over "think what the terrorists could do with [insert new technology/newly-public information/whatever]". Now I've got to endure it from /. posters as well? Terrorism is still vaporware, on the whole. Wake me up when terrorist attacks in the US become as frequent as, say IRA bombings were in the UK a couple decades ago.
If power/weight and power/ is good, this can mean a technological revolution. It would mean the end of the oil-era(it would make wind and solar power much more applicable). But we are waiting for that breakthrough for a long time already, so I'm not going to hold my breath.
Yes, I'm left. You have a problem with that?
does it flux?
My blog
Did I miss it in the article. Did they list the Farads or capacitance of any measure of this material? If not, what does all this really mean? Everything holds some sort of charge.. unless they specify what value it is, it really doesn't matter.
Ad eundum quo nemo ante iit!
I think that "sheet" is an exaggeration. The paper looks to be the size of a postage stamp. I was expecting an 8.5" x 11" sheet of paper. I wonder how much of a shock one would get when accidentally licking (or maybe purposely) the paper? I wonder if the paper battery will suffer the same problems as normal paper does, such as mold and humidity. What happens when they ignite?
If at first you don't succeed, call it version 1.0.
Hopefully RPI will release more info on their website soon. I was kind of surprised they didn't have a post about it on their homepage. (They almost always have in the 4 years I was there and the year since I graduated.)
AJ Henderson
Then why are they wearing rubber gloves to hold it?
We know that it was you, kdawson. Idiot.
Think of the trees!
i live on an alternate planet
Is it just me or does it seem like every 2 months since 1995 theres been some fantastic new discovery that will lead to amazing new batteries that can power a submarine and make you an omlette at same time forged of cutting edge carbon radiation and nuclear magic that will revolutionise the world in the next few years? cause im pretty sure were still using the same basic crap we were using then, give or take a few chemicals. My N95 battery lasts one day. I dont want to be negative, but all i see is breakthorughs, never products. someone please correct me if im just being ignorant.
So Skulldilocks threw acid on the schoolchildrens' faces, cause somebody from the bible told her to do it!
Bet you can't fold it more than 7 times
I couldn't fail to disagree with you any less.
Rensselaer. . . . Fight!
Rensselaer. . . . Fight!
Fight, Fight,
Fight, Fight,
Fight, Team, FIGHT!
Fight, Fight! for Rens-se-laer,
We must surely win this game.
Shout! Shout! for Rens-se- laer,
For our college and its fame.
Cheer! Cheer! for Rens-se-laer,
For the fighting engineers.
Fight! for your Alma Mater,
Rens-se-laer!
E to the X, DY, DX,
E to the X, DX.
Cosine, secant, tangent, sine
3-Point-1-4-1-5-9.
Square root, cube root, log of pi,
Dis-integrate them, R.P.I.!
I mean, look at that rock, what has it done for us? (besides making us smell what it's cooking.)
Maybe people will start reading the NYT in print again...
"Done with the sports section?" "Mind if I use it in my laptop?"
There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
"nanotubes on the lungs of rats produced more toxic response than quartz dust"
This simply isn't true. There have been periods in history when generations would pass without any discernable technological improvements. There have also been things called Dark Ages where technology actually recedes. (I guess that's still change, though.)
We have had steadily-accelerating technological progress for the last two centuries or so, which covers our memories and the stories passed down for a few generations. That's apparently enough to make people think it's been that way for all time.
Now the rate of change is so great that people factor it into their decision-making. We just assume that the computers we buy two years from now will be twice as powerful as the ones sold today. We fully expect our next cell phone will do more for less power and money, and we're actually a bit miffed that we don't have our flying cars yet.
[100% ISO 646 Compliant]
SVM, ERGO MONSTRO.
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Where are the numbers? As in how many microFarads per cubic centimeter does this material hold? As in how many milliAmp/hours? Without any numbers this is just science fiction, or a slow day at journalism school.
From the article.... Another key feature is the capability to use human blood or sweat to help power the battery.
And there, in one invention, is the end of oil wars and immigration issues. Now the administration will just lure all those excess foreigners over here with our new (Soylent) Green Cards.
Never shake hands with a man you meet in a fertility clinic.
Is there anything they can't do, it seems like every other day I hear about CNTs doing something new. I wonder how long until I see the headline "Carbon Nanotubes cure Cancer, AIDS, and the Common Cold simultaneously while juggling chainsaws and drinking a glass of water."
So far, the researchers have achieved power densities of 1.5 kilowatts per kilogram in the supercapacitor version and tested it over 100 cycles of discharge and recharge, well short of the million or so typical for current commercial capacitors. They have only made one-inch square versions of the paper, but the unique composite structure already reduces the complexity of creating such devices as well as battery-capacitor hybrids--and it has been used to light up a tiny red light-emitting diode, among other devices.
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From this Scientific American article:
http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa003&art
...that we'll see fancy newspapers like in the Harry Potter movies eventually? ;-)
Um... isn't the *dielectric* what is usually toxic? The dielectric that is off-handedly mentioned as something we just soak into the paper?
Operating temperature < 451 F.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
There are a lot of posts on here saying things equivalent to "This is worthless! Where's the numbers?" Step 1: Science - this is where you figure out what is theoretically possible. Step 2: Engineering - this is where you see how good/fast/cheap you can make it. This announcement is about Step 1. Step 2 will come later. Numbers at this point, before the engineers have gotten at it, would be pointless; they'd be irrelevant to the numbers for any production version.
Honestly, I think the more impressive stat is the one given in the summary: operating range of -100 to +300 degrees.
Most batteries are only viable in temperatures where water can stay liquid. Were something like this made commercially viable, you could do things like run electric vehicles in the arctic w/o needing to keep the battery warm. (emphasis added)
I would suggest that we could use this to run electric vehicles in space w/o needing to keep the battery warm.
NOTE: By "space" I mean not only the big, empty expanse around us, but also on the Moon, on Mars, etc. Even if the extremes there exceed that of this battery, the energy required to keep this battery within specs would be much less than for our current crop.
IIRC, wasn't one of the big concerns about the Mars landers (Opportunity and Spirit) during the big dust storm that insufficient sunlight would reach the solar cells to power the heater that kept the electronics from freezing? Well, okay, we'd still be left with the need to keep the *electronics* from freezing, but the less power required to keep the batteries warm, the more power would be left for the electronics... right?
While the cellulose in the paper may be biodegradable I strongly suspect the carbon nanotubes are not! Carbon nanotubes do not naturally exist in nature and its doubtful that enzymes would have evolved to degrade them. One can probably only attack them from the end and even then its seems iffy (the nanotube has to fit precisely into an enzyme active site designed to attack it). It remains to be seen whether we will be able to develop enzymes that will effectively degrade (or synthesize) carbon nanotubes. If one could one would see a lot more use of them in applications such as batteries/capacitors.
It is also probable that carbon nanotubes may be incompatible with bacterial degradation because the nanotubes could puncture the cell wall of the bacteria presumably leading to ion gradient disruptions. There may be similarities between possible toxicity of asbestos fibers and nanotubes. It is unclear (to me) whether animal immune systems may respond differently to smooth carbon surfaces compared with rough magnesium/iron silicate surfaces.
Be that as it may, disposal of carbon nanotubes is easy using incineration though in practice it would probably be much more useful to develop methods for recycling them. Given the structure of nanotubes it is unlikely they would suffer much degradation over time (probably leading to long battery/capacitor lifetimes).
imagine, a book/newspaper that is self-illuminating. coolness.
The They envision ultimately printing sheets between rollers like newsprint quote came from the original article. But I expect it is just stupidity introduced by an ignorant reporter, not from the scientists, who know better to think that paper is made by a newspaper press. The reporter likely actually asked if the paper could be printed on, was told yes, and from there spun this absurd story that seems to make it sound like the paper would be produces by a printing press.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
Sure, this idea looks good on paper... but...
*ducks*
Move all sig!
one sheet of this on top of a sheet of "battery paper" (or whatever they wanna call it) now we just need a paper thin media format that self decodes to the screen...
----------
Trying to fix or change something only guarantees and perpetuates it's existence
I figured that the operating limit would be around (Fahrenheit) 457. :-)
In theory, theory always works in practice. In practice, theory rarely works. <><
While the researcher must be doing something in order to make these claims, I can't find the PNAS article mentioned in TFA. I eagerly went to the PNAS site looking for the article upon which the news release is based (science is so garbled in press releases that I don't trust them to get the premise right, and I'm currently doing ionic liquid research), and I discoverd the article didn't exist! In fact, PNAS doesn't have an Aug. 13, 2007 issue. Googling the title of the article turns up two hits: one for the news story /. links us to, and the other to the alleged principle author's homepage, where he references it as 'to be published' on Aug. 13th. If its not published yet, it sounds great and plausible, but does it really exist? Can anyone find this article?
if you rolled this up and smoked it
As usual a lot of people are saying that this is useless. Really I think that's a bit of a bloody silly thing to say. How many times do you have to make something before you get it right? How many research groups do you have to have working on crazy shit like this, before you get one useful, commercially viable product? Even the most promising inventions still need millions of dollars and years to get it onto the shelf. The people who made this battery might strike it lucky and this could be in every ones pocket, powering your rollup laptop computer. No point having a flexible computer with a hard battery is it. There are sooooo many uses for this type of product. But people have to make a lot of useless ones before we will get one good one. Lots and lots of little steps. It's all progress.
Vampire paper batteries!
They're flexible, biocompatible, can be embedded in paper, and can be powered by human blood, sweat, or urine.
Last to one to write up a treatment for a horror story about rogue book/bot/bats who suck blood out of papercuts is a rotten egg.
"Vlad the impaper" mwahaha!
"Vampaper!"
"Vampire Bat-teries!" (oh!)
Thanks, I'll be here all week!
Around here we're surrounded by "Paper Ore"... That stuff grows on trees!
it was like that when I got here.. I wasen't here when that happened... second shift musta done that....
Am I the only one who wants to see them drop a stack of these down a stairway?
-John Fenley
Where's my warp-enabled rocket pack?
I don't therefore I'm not.
A reference to the sequel where they re-burn the ashes at an extra 6 degrees? *Rim-shot*
Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 FTW!
"Cheeze it!" - Bender
"Electrifying" financial reports
Kite fighting
Pinatas for April 1 parties
Pin the tail on the AAAAGGGHH!
Amusing bathroom tissue
Infant training pants
I can see a bunch of tree huggers protesting already.
Maybe if we recycle?
Based on today's other news, it would be nice if the batteries didn't burst into flame, as well.