Foldable origami battery is made from paper.
You may have enjoyed creating swans, frogs, or inflatable
boxes with origami in the past. Sean Choi, however, is using it to create
electricity.
Choi is an engineer at Binghamton
University who’s been
working on creating a battery to
power biosensors. His focus has been on using paper, because it’s
biodegradable, easy to source, and cheap.
Just like a regular alkaline battery
that you’d buy on your way out of the grocery store, Choi’s paper battery
utilizes carbon. In the origami battery, however, the carbon acts as the anode rather
than the cathode. It gets screen-printed on to form a water-absorbing layer on
one side of the paper. On the other side, a coating of a nickel-based solution
is applied to create an air-breathing anode.
The battery needs one more thing to
be able to produce power: bacteria. Choi says it can come from “any type of
organic matter.” One very easy place to find bacteria is in untreated water. A
murky puddle of water sitting in a ditch or pothole is loaded with bacteria, and the paper battery
is more than willing to slurp it up through capillary action. Add a single drop
of dirty water and the battery has everything it needs to start producing
power.
Choi’s battery can already produce
enough power with the battery to light up a small LED. Ultimately he hopes that
it’ll eventually be able to fully power a biosensor — creating medical devices
that are self-contained, compostable, and can be used even in the isolated,
undeveloped areas of the world.
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