Researchers in the US have constructed batteries that can be completely absorbed by the environment or living organisms after they have worked for a short amount of time. The batteries could be developed to power temporary cardiac pacemakers or for environmental monitoring.
Earlier work on similar technology had been limited by low voltage outputs or energy densities, restricting their usefulness to low-power systems like LEDs or simple calculators. ‘We noticed the operating voltage of almost all the reported batteries were less than one volt, and then the capacity was negligible … if you want to have something for real life applications, you really need to increase the output voltage, and the capacity of the cell,’ explains Amay Bandodkar at North Carolina State University who led the work alongside John Rogers of Northwestern University.
The team began with materials that…
Split-cell design behind batteries that degrade and get absorbed by their environment | Research
