Nanowires inside a rat can convert the power of breathing and heartbeats into electricity, according to researchers at the Georgia Institute of Technology. The nano-generator could conceivably lead to nano-scale implants and sensors powered by the body, Technology Review reports.
The same GIT team proved five years ago that zinc oxide nanowires could produce electricity from a running hamster, for instance, or from tapping fingers. The wires produce electricity when under mechanical stress, called the piezoelectric effect. But now, it’s been proven to work inside a living animal.
Zhong Lin Wang, a materials science and engineering professor at Georgia Tech, led the team that attached the nano-generator to a rat’s diaphragm.
Researchers put a zinc oxide nanowire onto a flexible polymer and encapsulated it into a polymer casing to protect it from bodily fluids, Tech Review reports. When attached to the rat’s diaphragm, the animal’s breathing stretched the nanowire, and it generated a tiny amount of electricity — about four pico-amps of current at two millivolts. When it was attached to the rat’s heart, the nano-generator produced about 30 pico-amps at about three millivolts.
The rat generator operates at the femtowatt scale — a pico-amp is a million millionth of an amp, so it is a tiny amount of current — so not very much power. But the technology has potential to power nano-sized devices, Wang says in a paper on the results published in the journal Advanced Materials.
Wang’s team is already building on the rat findings, Tech Review reports. The team has a device that integrates hundreds of nanowires into an array, giving an output current of about 100 nano-amps at 1.2 volts. The next step is to connect the higher-powered nano-generator inside an animal, Wang says. [Technology Review]
Power From the Heart: These graphs show the power output of a nano-generator attached to the diaphragm and heart of a lab rat. Zhong Lin Wang et. al, Advanced Materials
Did that headline get your blood pumping? Good. In the future you’ll make a great battery.
Scientists at University of Pennsylvania have been tinkering with germanium-tellurium nanowires and have figured out how to make them store data in three states. Yup, that’s 0,1 and 2… binary seems passé now doesn’t it? According to the team, storing trits instead of bits “could allow for a huge increase in the memory density of potential future devices,” meaning higher capacity storage in the same size. And using nanowires is a particularly good way to make memory chips because it may be possible to make them self-organise, making “top-down” silicon-chip fabrication seem clunky. The team’s busy perfecting their understanding of nanowire size and chemistry, so don’t expect to see results from the tech too soon. [Physorg]
