Researchers Use Virus To Increase Battery Life Tenfold

For once, a virus is helping technology. Researchers from the University of Maryland have discovered a way to vastly improve the capacity of lithium-ion batteries using the Tobacco mosaic virus (TMV).

A biological virus, TMV is widely known for its destructive effects on tobacco, tomatoes, peppers and other plants. Its rigid rod-like shape, and its ability to bind to metal, enabled researchers to use it to increase the surface area of electrodes in a battery.

Genetic modification

The Maryland researchers, headed by Professor Reza Ghodssi, found they could modify the TMV rods to bind perpendicularly to the metallic surface of the battery electrode arranged in intricate and orderly patterns.

They then coated the rods with a conductive thin film that acts as a current collector, and then with the battery’s active material, which participates in its electrochemical reactions.

The technique increases the electrode surface area and thus its capacity to store energy and enable fast charge/discharge times. The virus becomes inert during the manufacturing process, meaning the batteries don’t transmit the virus.

The resulting batteries have an up to ten-fold increase in energy capacity over standard lithium-ion batteries.

The process can also be used to create new types of batteries for smaller devices, acording to Ghodssi.

“The technology that we have developed can be used to produce energy storage devices for integrated microsystems such as wireless sensors networks,” he said in a statement. “These systems have to be really small in size – millimeter or sub-millimeter – so that they can be deployed in large numbers in remote environments for applications like homeland security, agriculture, environmental monitoring and more. To power these devices, equally small batteries are required, without compromising in performance.”

Ideal size and shape

TMV was selected because its size and shape makes it ideal as a template for building battery electrodes, Ghodssi said.

The researchers said the process can be scaled up to meet the needs of industrial-scale production.

The process involves first modifying, propagating and preparing the virus, then processing it to grow nanorods on a metal plate, and finally incorporating the resulting plates into finished batteries.

“On average, one acre of tobacco can produce approximately 2,100 pounds of leaf tissue, yielding approximately one pound of TMV per pound of infected leaves,” said James Culver, a member of the Institute for Bioscience and Biotechnology and a professor in the Department of Plant Science and Landscape Architecture, in a statement.

In February British scientists at Imperial College London said they had developed a prototype plastic supercapacitor, potentially signalling the end of conventional batteries. The scientists have created a plastic that can store and release electricity. The prototype designed by the Imperial College London takes five seconds to charge from a normal power supply, and can light an LED for 20 minutes.

The virus-enhanced battery could be of interest to laptop designers for example, constantly battling battery life for portable devices. However it could also be used to power a car or even mobile phones and MP3 players.