Nanotechnology: Researchers Invent Human Hair Strand-sized Battery!

In an independent research carried out by a couple of researchers from the University of Illinois, the merits of nanotechnology were put forth. Among the several benefits stated, the most striking one seemed to be the fact that the nanotechnology could power your everyday gadgets making them last for a good whole month!

Nano, is here!

Nanotechnology has now been empowered to build a battery, which can fit snugly into a wire, less thick than the 'wavelength of visible light' (i.e. 400 nanometers), subsequently making it the smallest battery to have ever been made (i.e. 150 nanometers). According to reports, however, the only glitch in the furtherance of these technologies is the process of powering them. Now, a team of engineers from the Rice University have come up with the ingenious idea of having batteries of just 50 microns. Don’t know how much that quite is? 50 microns is as thick as a strand of human hair. The researchers can build the battery, using the following process:

• A nanowire template needs to be given a coating of a thin layer of copper
• To create separate nanowires, the pores have to be filled with a nickel/tin alloy to build the anodes. They then add a thin layer of polyethlene-oxide gel, working as insulator and an electrolyte.
• Polyaniline to be used to fill the remaining space in the pores, thereby creating the cathodes.

Researchers are now readying an array of these nanowire batteries. Length and thickness, for that matter is not a constraint, since these can be taken to larger sizes, too. While these batteries are being worked on, all we could hope for is the success of nanotechnology and its variants that could lead to a pathbreaking revolution in powering technology.