Researchers at the Chemnitz University of Technology have presented the world’s smallest battery to date as an application-oriented prototype and it shows “encouraging energy storage performance at the sub-square-millimeter scale.”
It is sized as small as a tiny grain of dust and it can already power the world’s smallest computer chips for nearly 10 hours. The battery has been developed for smart dust applications, which are tiny microelectronic devices, the most obvious application is for biocompatible sensor systems.
To date, the micro-battery solutions either gave out too much power or too little power. There were also limitations with respect to the usage environment, or they were just not small enough. The new battery solution can eliminate these shortcomings.
In order to achieve it, the research team has employed the same process that is used by Tesla to manufacture batteries on a large scale for its electric cars. A ‘Swiss-roll’ or ‘micro-origami’ procedure is used to create a product compatible with existing chip manufacturing technologies while they are capable of producing high output.
The battery has been sized under 1mm² with a minimum energy density of 100 microwatt hours per square centimeter, despite this it can be integrated on a chip.
The technology has not been developed with smartphones in mind so we cannot expect to see this featured on a smartphone. Researchers hope to see its deployment into micro and nanosensors in areas like IoT, miniaturized medical implants, micro-robotic systems, and ultra-flexible electronics.
Nevertheless, it is an exciting step and development in battery technology.
Source: Techxplore
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