Traditional Chinese calligraphy involving ink on paper
led to the development of new awesome flexible, rollable, foldable battery. The
battery is developed by scientists from China.
The demand for flexible devices is growing rapidly all
around the world as now the technology could enable such things like screens
and solar panels to bend, roll and fold. These flexible electronic devices need
batteries which are flexible as the devices are and powerful enough to keep
them running but conventional batteries are too rigid and bulky to be used in
flexible electronics.Chinese scientists, however, have developed a flexible
lithium-based battery that is based on Chinese brush painting.
Now days all the devices from smartphones to tablet,
computer to laptop, all of them are powered by Lithium-ion batteries. However,
these so-called lithium-ain batteries could, in principle, hold five to 10
times as much energy as a lithium-ion battery of the same weight. This means
that lithium-air batteries could theoretically give electric cars the same
range as gasoline ones.
Usually a battery contain two electrodes — the anode
and the cathode. In a lithium-air battery, the anode is generally made of
lithium metal, while the cathode is typically a porous carbon material that
allows the surrounding air into the battery. As the lithium reacts with oxygen
in the air, it discharges electricity. Recharging the device reverses the
process.
The scientists noted that the main component of black
painting ink is carbon, and that paper is porous, thin, flexible, light and
cheap. They reasoned that ink drawn on paper could serve as a cathode for a
lithium-air battery in a very simple manner.
"Due to the ultra-high theoretical energy density of
lithium-oxygen batteries, they may be one of the most suitable candidates in
the future for the development of flexible electronics," study senior
author Xinbo Zhang, a materials scientist at the Changchun Institute of Applied
Chemistry in China, told Live Science.
The researchers have constructed a battery from a
sandwich of three layers — an ink-paper cathode, a sheet of lithium foil as the
anode, and a sheet made of glass fibers between the anode and the cathode that
permits electrically charged ions to flow between the cathode and anode.
The prototype batteries developed by Zhang and his
colleagues possessed energy-storage capacities comparable to commercial
lithium-ion batteries, even after 1,000 cycles of flexing back and forth. They
could also easily fold these sheets into battery packs.
So guys now we are not going to have just flexible
devices, but these flexible devices are going to be much more powerful than the
ones that we have now.
Posts
No comments :
Post a Comment