This tiny battery the size of a grain of salt is capable of powering a computer with no problem. To develop the architecture of the battery, the researchers were inspired by a pastry, the Swiss roll.
Scientists from the Chemnitz University of Technology (Germany) have succeeded in developing a tiny battery capable of powering a computer. As part of a collaboration with a German electromechanical institute and the Changchun Institute of Applied Chemistry in China, researchers have developed an accumulator presented “like the smallest battery in the world”.
Unlike other microbatteries invented by scientists, the battery is capable of powering large devices, such as a traditional computer. It is not confined to supplying energy to tiny devices of the same size.
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A tiny battery inspired by a pastry
According to the study published by the researchers, current science and the latest advances have made it possible to reduce the size of components such as batteries. The report mentions in this respect bell’s law, which has been predicting since the 1960s that the size needed to design a computer will get smaller and smaller. At the same time, Moore’s Law, enunciated in 1965, states that computing power will grow exponentially, even as components shrink.
“In the 1960s, a computer had to take up an entire room. A small workstation was introduced in the 1970s and continued to shrink in size, evolving into the laptop computers that people use every day. The rate of miniaturization is about 100 times per decade”, explain the researchers. In fact, the advent of reduced batteries is not a surprise.
Scientists claim to have inspired by a pastry called “the Swiss roll” to elaborate the architecture of the battery. This rolled cake, originating in Austria rather than Switzerland, consists of a roll-up of sponge cake, cream, frosting and jam.
This coiled architecture allows the battery to deliver a significant amount of power without taking up too much space. “Our results show encouraging performance in energy storage at the square millimeter scale. There is still huge optimization potential for this technology, and we can expect much more powerful microbatteries in the future.”explains project member Dr. Minshen Zhu.
The innovation presented should eventually make it possible to explode the capacity of the batteries. For the time being, the battery is still at the prototype stage.
