In 2009 scientists at Stanford University, California, successfully created a paper based battery.
The group of scientists took a sheet of ordinary printer paper and coated it in an ink made from carbon nanotubes and added silver nanowires. The paper was put into a conventional battery environment with a cathode and anode. The battery functioned perfectly both effectively storing and discharging electricity.
Current battery technology is fast reaching its practical limitations. Lead based batteries are heavy, boxy and bad for the environment. Paper based batteries could see the development of light weight, flexible electricity storage systems. With the potential ability to store and discharge 40,000 times the batteries are an order of magnitude greater than the best lithium batteries used today.
Yi Cui, assistant professor of materials science and engineering said. “Society really needs a low-cost, high-performance energy storage device, such as batteries and simple supercapacitors.”
The new technology is scalable and could be used everywhere existing batteries and capacitors are used. In the motor industry for example the batteries of hybrid and electric cars take up a significant amount of space and add considerable weight to vehicles.
It is predicted that commercial production will happen very quickly. The demand for high quality, lost cost storage is already here. Practical uses include storing electricity generated during low peak times, at night for example, to be used during the day.
Carbon Nanotubes were first documented in 1952, by two Soviet scientists Radushkevich and Lukyanovich, who described sheets of graphite, rolled into a tube, 50 billionths of a metre long.
Research into nanotubes continued and in 1985 three scientists Robert Curl, Harold Kroto and Richard Smalley, at Rice University, Houston, Texas, discovered perfect spheres of carbon. They named the spheres Buckminster Fullerenes because they looked similar to the geodesic dome invented by American architect Richard Buckminster Fuller.
Although carbon nanotubes and balls had been discovered technology to study their properties lagged significantly behind. Each year of study brings a new discovery.
It is known that nanotubes are incredibly strong. They are harder than diamonds and for the ratio of the diameter to the length of the tube they are the strongest thing known to man.
There has been a wide range of research into finding practical uses for them. Some include developing building materials containing nanotubes, making buildings incredibly strong and resistant to things like earthquakes. Other researchers have looked at nanotubes and magnetic fields.
Source:
http://news.stanford.edu/news/2009/december7/nanotubes-ink-paper-120709.html
[...] Paper based batteries March 2010 3 [...]