Researchers Prototype NextGen Battery That Will Stretch with Electronics and Implants
by Charles Q. Choi
Imagine batteries stretchy enough to flex inside clothing or under the skin. Unusually elastic batteries could one day help power flexible electronics worn on or implanted inside the body, researchers say.
“Some relatively simple but powerful ideas allow one to construct rechargeable, lithium-ion batteries that have the physical properties of a rubber band,” says John Rogers, a materials scientist at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
Applications may include robotic skin and wearable health monitors, he added.
The Department of Energy Wants To Make Better Batteries By Recreating the Manhattan Project
GIZMODO Eric Limer Dec 1, 2012
The U.S. Dept. of Energy has big plans. They want batteries that are five times more powerful than what we’ve got today, and they want them to be five times cheaper. All that in just five years. It’s a tall order, but they’ve got a plan: recreate the Manhattan Project.
It goes a little something like this. First, the DOE will create the Joint Center for Energy Storage Research, and then throw $120 million at them over half a decade. Then they’ll round up the best and brightest at six national labs, five universities, and four private firms. And lastly, we’ll (hopefully) get a Manhattan Project-esque leap forward in battery tech.
U.S. Energy Secretary Stephen Chu put it this way in a statement streamed live from Argonne National Laboratory where the project will be centered:
When you had to deliver the goods very, very quickly, you needed to put the best scientists next to the best engineers across disciplines to get very focused. …[It’s] very, very important for American industrial competitiveness that research be intimately linked with manufacturing in a way that will propel the United States forward. This is what the whole Hub concept is about.
