Nanotubes Could Be the Petite Powerhouses of the Future
Posted by Gabriella_Mangino on Thursday, Mar 11, 2010
Conventional batteries are so old-school. They’ve been around since the 1800’s, and require toxic non-renewable materials. Plus don’t you just hate how energy leaks away over time?
Well, tiny tubes coated with chemical fuel could be the future, ending the reign of those tired, standard lithiums. And could enable a future of miniscule electronics.
Michael Strano and a team at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology have been working with wire-like molecules that are mere billionths of a meter across, called “nanotubes.” These little guys are coated with cyclotrimethylene trinitramine, a fuel that when triggered generates bits of electric current. Strano told the BBC “one property that nanotubes have is that they conduct heat very, very well along their length, up to a hundred times faster than in metal.”
The process creates “thermopower waves” or voltage, and a lot of it (way more than calculated by thermoelectrics). Nanotubes carry up to 100 times more energy than an equivalent weight of lithium-ion battery. And, theoretically, these baby batteries wouldn’t lose their charge overtime. However, a miniature amount of energy is needed set off the reaction—Strano says all you need is a slight push of the finger.
Right now, nanotubes are one-use only, but the technology could be adapted to produce an alternating current in the future. Strano’s team has got a lot of work to do, what’s going on in this petite powerhouses is still pretty unclear, but they have high hopes. Strano says not only could nanowires be arranged to power larger devices, but they could power electronic devices the size of a grain of rice, sensors injected into the body, or “environmental sensors that could be scattered like dust into the air.” Whoa.
Via BBC News and GizmagFiled under:
About the author
Sometimes the world has a load of questions (me too). gabriella@motherboard.tv
