Manufacturology

Batteries of seaweed

Imag­ine an e–book con­sist­ing only of a paper bat­tery with elec­tronic ink and cir­cuits printed directly on the battery.

Sounds inter­est­ing? This may become real­ity with a newly invented bat­tery. Read on.

Will our future bat­ter­ies be made of seaweed?

Algal–blooms have been a major prob­lem in the Baltic sea over the last decade or so. Causes are attrib­uted to be global warm­ing, excess nutri­ents like phos­pho­rus, or a com­bi­na­tion. “What to do with all these algae?” was the title of a research paper pub­lished in 2002 by Albert Mihranyan and col­leagues [Strømme, Mihranyan, Ek, Mate­ri­als Let­ters 57 (2002) 569–572]. Back then, the authors con­cluded that “green algae fil­a­ments can be used as a raw mate­r­ial for the pro­duc­tion of micro­crys­talline cel­lu­lose”. Prop­er­ties of algae–based cel­lu­lose were thought to be suit­able for phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal tablet manufacturing.

Now Albert Mihranyan, researcher at the Ångström lab­o­ra­tory at Upp­sala Uni­ver­sity, has won the Chester Carl­son award for invent­ing an inno­v­a­tive “paper bat­tery” in which algae cel­lu­lose has a cen­tral role. Per­son­ally I find this much more inter­est­ing than the pills that were orig­i­nally dis­cussed in the now eight year old article.

Albert Mihranyan wins the Chester Carl­son award for devel­op­ing a bat­tery based on algae cellulose.

“Awards like this are really impor­tant. After spend­ing lots of hours in the lab, test­ing many ideas that didn’t work out, this price is a con­fir­ma­tion that I’m now on the right track. It gives a lot of energy,” says Albert Mihranyan to SvD.

The bat­tery con­sists mainly of paper and salt water. Or more pre­cisely, nano–structured paper and a con­duct­ing poly­mer. Pos­si­ble appli­ca­tions are envi­ron­men­tally friendly energy stor­age sys­tems, biodegrad­able elec­tron­ics like sen­sors and dis­plays, and “smart” tex­tiles. [source]

Pre­vi­ous shots at devel­op­ing paper bat­ter­ies have been suc­cess­ful, but failed to reach the mar­ket because of high man­u­fac­tur­ing costs. On the con­trary, man­u­fac­tur­ing of the new algae cel­lu­lose bat­tery is said to be very sim­ple and low cost.

As I get it, this is because the struc­ture of the algae paper is appro­pri­ate in itself. It is there­fore no longer nec­es­sary to rein­force the paper with the expen­sive car­bon nan­otubes that have until now been used in paper batteries.

Accord­ing to the SvD arti­cle, the new bat­tery will not replace the ordi­nary bat­ter­ies that we now use in elec­tronic devices like cam­eras or mobile phones. Rather, it will be a com­ple­ment that opens–up lots of new oppor­tu­ni­ties. Imag­ine a room where the wall­pa­pers are at the same time a bat­tery, or card­board pack­ag­ing boxes where the box is a bat­tery that pow­ers an inte­grated infor­ma­tion screen.

And, as I hinted in the begin­ning of this post, I myself can imag­ine an e–book con­sist­ing only of a paper bat­tery with elec­tronic ink and cir­cuits printed directly on the bat­tery. Super thin, super flex­i­ble, and biodegrad­able. I doubt that any­body will ever want to sub­scribe to a paper news­pa­per again once that prod­uct comes true…

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