A battery smaller than a grain of salt, can be mass-produced and can be used to power computers smaller than a millimetre in size and can be fitted via toll processing and chip manufacture onto dust-sized computer chips.
The team at the Chemnitz University of Technology published their findings in Advanced Energy Materials and declared that their battery, currently in a prototype stage, is by far the smallest battery ever produced.
Whilst the main focus of battery development is on either large scale electric batteries or batteries powerful, long-lasting and ecologically sound enough to enable mass adoption of electric vehicles, this battery’s main focus is much smaller and yet much broader.
Microelectronic devices, often known as smart dust, are tiny computer systems often clustered together and operated using internet of things technology, is a potential game-changer if they can be produced and powered cheaply enough.
One primary use case that has highlighted an issue with smart dust as it presently stands is human body sensors, which initially were planned to have no battery at all and would instead convert body heat or vibrations into electricity.
The problem is that the output generated by body heat power is too low to provide consistent power, often a requirement for body sensors and smart dust health monitoring systems, and other power sources such as light or vibrations are not always available.
Having a rechargeable powerful battery source would solve this issue, but developing battery technology small enough has been a major challenge.
Early examples, such as the tiny button cells used in hearing aids, use wet chemistry that may not be appropriate for biotechnological uses, and the current miniature battery technology using stacks of thin films have poor energy storage and cannot be made much smaller than one square millimetre.
The team’s approach used an approach similar to Tesla’s batteries with the use of a layered ‘Swiss-roll’ system that has inherent tension to keep it in place without the need for external force, which is currently compatible with chip manufacturing technologies.