Nanoparticles to improve batteries for biomedical use
By IANSThursday, February 11, 2010
WASHINGTON - Nanoparticles are part of a new family of materials being created for improved batteries for medical use.
Esther Takeuchi, professor in advanced power sources at University at Buffalo, had developed the lithium/silver vanadium oxide battery, which was a major factor in bringing implantable cardiac defibrillators (ICDs) into production in the late 1980s.
ICDs shock the heart into a normal rhythm when it goes into fibrillation (erratic hearbeats).
Twenty years later, with more than 300,000 of these units being implanted every year, the majority of them are powered by the battery system developed and improved by Takeuchi and her team.
For that work, she has earned more than 140 patents, believed to be more than any other woman in the US. ICD batteries, in general, now last five to seven years.
But Takeuchi and her husband Kenneth Takeuchi, professor of chemistry, and Amy Marschilok, research assistant professor of chemistry, are exploring even-better battery systems, by fine-tuning bimetallic materials at the atomic level.
So far, their results show that they can make their materials 15,000 times more conductive upon initial battery use due to in-situ (that is, in the original material) generation of metallic silver nanoparticles.
Their new approach to material design will allow development of higher-power, longer-life batteries than was previously possible.
These and other improvements are boosting interest in battery materials and the revolutionary devices that they may make possible, said a Buffalo release.
“We may be heading toward a time when we can make batteries so tiny that they — and the devices they power — can simply be injected into the body,” Takeuchi says.
She explains that new and improved batteries for biomedical applications could, in a practical way, revolutionise treatments for some of the most persistent diseases by making feasible devices that would be implanted in the brain to treat stroke and mental illness, in the spine to treat chronic pain.
