A Radio Isotope Battery To Power Electronic Devices Soon?

Posted by Shahbaaz ||

October 15, 2009 ||

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When we talk about batteries, we are certainly concerned about its size and more importantly its backup time. From a button-sized battery in watches to huge batteries that power cars, offices and technical systems, a battery is one means of keeping your electronic device running longer.

Rechargeable batteries get bulkier by the inch as their performance stats increase. To reduce the size of the battery and increase the power supply, a team of researchers lead by Kwon at University of Missouri have been working on a nuclear energy source that is smaller, lighter and more efficient than the conventional battery types.

Kwon and his team has encounterd a new method of building batteries that use nuclear technology and yet are reportedly safe for use. The primary requirment? Extracting maximum power from least possible sized battery using nuclear energy to improve battery life.

“To provide enough power, we need certain methods with high energy density,” said Jae Kwon, assistant professor of electrical and computer engineering at MU. “The radioisotope battery can provide power density that is six orders of magnitude higher than chemical batteries.”

The radioisotope battery uses a liquid semiconductor instead of a solid one (that most of the batteries use) and is reportedly smaller than the size of a penny. This nuclear powered battery can be used to safely power various micro/nanoelectromecanical systems (M/NEMS) once it is developed.

“People hear the word ‘nuclear’ and think of something very dangerous,” he said. “However, nuclear power sources have already been safely powering a variety of devices, such as pace-makers, space satellites and underwater systems.”

“The critical part of using a radioactive battery is that when you harvest the energy, part of the radiation energy can damage the lattice structure of the solid semiconductor,” Kwon said. “By using a liquid semiconductor, we believe we can minimize that problem.”

As a future proposal, Kwon would experiment to make this battery using different materials and shrink its size to make it “thinner than the thickness of human hair”. Is it when we hear these sort of things that we say that we are striking into future technology at nuclear speeds?

Click here to view the Press Release.

Tags: Good Battery Performance, improve battery life, Radio Isotope Battery, Rechargable Batteries