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Indians, key to nanotech battery breakthrough
Anand Parthasarathy
| Three departments at Rensselaer Polytechnic in the United States collaborated |
Paper-thin pundits: The nanotech paper battery developed in the U.S. — and the Indians behind the breakthrough. (Top) Ajayan, Nalamasu, and Murugesan. (Bottom) Manikoth, Pushparaj, and Kumar.
Bangalore: Researchers — most of them Indians — at the oldest technological university in the United States, have announced a breakthrough that might see ultra-thin batteries, made up of cellulose, the main component of paper.
Using nanotechnology — the science of the very small — the faculty and students of three departments at the Rensselaer Polytehnic in Troy, New York State, have created a flexible device, 90 per cent of which is composed of cellulose, the same plant cells used in newsprint. They infused this material with a nanotechnology material called carbon nanotubes, which acts as the plus and minus terminals of the battery and allow the device to store electricity. It can also be used as a capacitor to store a charge.
The device can be rolled, twisted, folded, cut ... and holds out the hope that, when the process is refined, batteries can be ‘printed’ in continuous rolls just as one prints paper in a printing press.
The findings are being reported in the August 21 issue of the “Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,” in the United States. The three department heads who joined hands on the project are Pulickel M. Ajayan, Professor of Materials Science and team leader of the carbon nanotechnology research centre at Rensselaer; Robert Linhardt, Professor of Biocatalysis and Metabolic Engineering; and Omkaram Nalamasu, Director of the Centre for Integrated Engineering.
Professor Ajayan did his B.Tech. in Metallurgy, at Banaras Hindu University in 1985, before moving to the U.S. and obtaining his Ph.D in Materials Sciences at Northwestern University.
Dr. Nalamasu, an alumnus of Osmania University, Hyderabad, and a Ph.D in Chemistry from British Columbia University, Canada, is also the Chief Technology Officer of the Nanotechnology Consortium of New Jersey State.
Others who co-authored the paper are Victor Pushparaj, Senior Research Specialist in the Materials Science Department who originally did his Ph.D at the Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore; and three post doctoral research associates: Shaijumon Manikoth, who did his Ph.D at IIT, Madras; Ashavani Kumar who came with an M.Sc. in Chemistry from IIT, Kharagpur and a research doctorate at the National Chemical Laboratory, Pune — and Saravanababu Murugesan, who did his B.E. in Chemical Engineering from Annamalai University, Tamil Nadu, and his Ph.D at Rensselaer.
Co-authors
The two non-Indian co-authors are senior research associate Lijie Ci and Nanotechnology Centre Manager Robert Vajtai.
Dr. Manikoth is quoted in the Polytechnic’s release, pointing out that the paper battery is free of any toxic chemicals, and therefore a ‘green’ device. Dr. Pushparaj suggests that it could be safely used to power devices such as cardiac pacemakers.
Team leader Professor Ajayan says: “The technology is just right for the current energy market ... looking for smaller, lighter power sources.” The team has applied for a patent and working on ways to turn the technology into a manufacturing process.
The full paper entitled “Flexible energy storage devices based on nanocomposite paper” by Dr. Pushparaj et al can be downloaded from the web page at http://www.pnas.org/cgi/reprint/0706508104v1
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