Origami is the Japanese art of paper folding, can be used to create beautiful birds, frogs and other small sculptures.
Last Year a team of engineers from MIT and Harvard has developed an origami flat-pack Robot which can fold itself and crawl away without any human intervention.
But now a Binghamton University engineer says this technique can be applied to building batteries, too. The battery generates power from microbial respiration, delivering enough energy to run a paper-based biosensor with nothing more than a drop of bacteria-containing liquid.
“Any type of organic material can be the source of bacteria for the bacterial metabolism.” The method should be especially useful to anyone working in remote areas with limited resources. Indeed, because paper is inexpensive and readily available, many experts working on disease control and prevention have seized upon it as a key material in creating diagnostic tools for the developing world.
“Paper is cheap and it’s biodegradable,” Choi says. “And we don’t need external pumps or syringes because paper can suck up a solution using capillary force.”
While paper-based biosensors have shown promise in this area, but they must be paired with hand-held devices for analysis. A self-powered system in which a paper-based battery would create enough energy(microwatts) to run the biosensor. The goal is to create technique that allows those sensors to power themselves.
The battery, which folds into a square the size of a matchbook, uses an inexpensive air-breathing cathode created with nickel sprayed onto one side of ordinary office paper. The anode is screen printed with carbon paints, creating a hydrophilic zone with wax boundaries.
The total cost of this potentially game-changing device is Five cents.
The paper “An origami paper-based bacteria-powered battery” published in the July edition of the journal Nano Energy.
