Slashdot Mirror
Nanotech Ink Turns Paper Into a Low-Cost Battery
jangel writes "Stanford University researchers have demonstrated a way to turn ordinary paper into a battery, which may be crumpled or pressed into any form. It's said the technology promises greater durability, higher efficiency, and faster energy transfer than traditional batteries. The technique uses special ink made of carbon nanotubes and silver nanowires. Thanks to the small diameters of these materials, the ink sticks strongly to the fibrous paper, allowing the battery to be extremely durable. The paper battery could last through 40,000 charge-discharge cycles — at least an order of magnitude more than lithium batteries. According to the researchers, the paper batteries will be low-cost, may be crumpled or folded, and can even be soaked in acidic or basic solutions, yet their performance does not degrade. 'We just haven't tested what happens when you burn it,' one of the researchers quipped." This is the same Stanford research team, lead by Yi Cui, whose work with nanotechnology for battery applications we have discussed before. We've also delved into alternate routes to the holy grail of the ultra-thin battery.
What's the ink made of? Oil? If so: never mind.
How fast an you charge it without it bursting into flames?
If it can charge faster and has equal power density to LiON batteries, and the ink isn't made out of oil, and the entire thing can be built outside of a petroleum context, I think we might have a winner...
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
These paper based batteries appear to function in a very similar fashion to the algae derived cellulose batteries mentioned on Slashdot a while ago. The paper probably acts as a support just as the algae cellulose particles did in the previously mentioned design.
Sigs are too short to say anything truly profound so read the above post instead.
How much silver is actually sued in these batteries? Will availability be an issue? Does it work with other conductive materials like copper or aluminum? Intuitively I suspect the problem here will be energy density for the simple reason it is the one thing they did not promise would be awesome. That said with the tesla beating 500km recently these batteries coudl eprform well even if they had half of Li-Ion energy density.