Carriage House Plans: Car Battery

Sunday, 6 January 2013

Car Battery

It's not just researchers at the Rensselaer Polytechnique Institute who are working on bio-batteries. Many other corporations, universities and research foundations are competing to produce viablebatteries that can be powered off of organic compounds, especially human fluids. Researchers consider sugar and human blood glucose potentially valuable sources of power because they occur naturally, are easily accessible and don't produce harmful emissions.In 2003, Japanese researchers at Panasonic's Nanotechnology Research Laboratory announced that they were working on extracting power from blood glucose. At the time, they were using enzymes -- a frequent component of bio-batteries due to their catalytic properties -- to retrieve electrons from glucose. Two years later, a different Japanese research team, this one from Tohoku University, announced that they had succeeded in creating a small "biological fuel cell." Their cell could be used to power small medical devices, such as an implant to measure blood sugar levels in diabetics. Future versions of such technology could, like RPI's nanocomposite paper, be used to power an artificial heart with the blood that flows through and around it.