To say that your battery is “smoking” would normally be the sign of a failed circuit, but researchers at the A. James Clark School of Engineering and College of Agriculture and Natural Resources at the University of Maryland may be putting a virus that’s bad even for tobacco to good use in creating a battery that may be up to 10 times more powerful than today’s best lithium cells. Professor Reza Ghodssi, director of the Institute for Systems Research and Herbert Rabin Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering at the Clark School, is “harnessing and exploiting the ‘self-renewing’ and ‘self-assembling’ properties” of the Tobacco Mosaic Virus (TMV), which in its unrestrained natural state destroys tobacco, tomatoes, peppers and other leafy green things. The idea that battery creation is a self-directing event is belied by the University’s video. Scientists found, “They can modify the TMV rods to bind perpendicularly to the metallic surface of a battery electrode and arrange the rods in intricate and orderly …
The Painted Battery
Dr. Yi Cui, assistant professor of materials science and engineering at Stanford University, is a battery scientist extraordinaire, and a presenter at last April’s Third Annual Electric Aircraft Symposium. His paper was well received, one in which he discussed how breakthroughs in his lab could lead to an 80-percent improvement in battery capacity for the same weight as current units. He has topped himself with an extraordinary approach to manufacturing batteries. Imagine painting an ordinary piece of paper with a coating of carbon nanotubes and silver nanowires, and ending up with a very thin battery or supercapacitor. This video, courtesy of Stanford University, shows that process, and includes Dr. Cui lighting an LED with a small square of paper. He and his colleagues have abused the battery, washing it with acid and crumbling it, but it still produces current. He notes that they haven’t tried burning it. Dr. Cui predicts that such batteries could be good for 40,000 cycles, a huge leap …