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Store Electricity In Paper - Next Stop, E-Paper!
Power Paper! That's the latest from researchers at Linköping University’s Laboratory of Organic Electronics, Sweden. It's just the sort of enabling technology that science fiction writers need to make their ideas true in reality.
(Store electricity in paper)
One sheet, 15 centimetres in diameter and a few tenths of a millimetre thick can store as much as 1 F, which is similar to the supercapacitors currently on the market. The material can be recharged hundreds of times and each charge only takes a few seconds.“Thin films that function as capacitors have existed for some time. What we have done is to produce the material in three dimensions. We can produce thick sheets,” says Xavier Crispin, professor of organic electronics and co-author to the article just published in Advanced Science.
The material, power paper, looks and feels like a slightly plasticky paper and the researchers have amused themselves by using one piece to make an origami swan — which gives an indication of its strength.
The structural foundation of the material is nanocellulose, which is cellulose fibres which, using high-pressure water, are broken down into fibres as thin as 20 nm in diameter. With the cellulose fibres in a solution of water, an electrically charged polymer (PEDOT:PSS), also in a water solution, is added. The polymer then forms a thin coating around the fibres.
SF fans have been waiting patiently for their color e-paper, and you can't have a sheet of e-paper that doesn't have a power source, can you? Check out the mediatron from Neal Stephenson's 1995 novel The Diamond Age:
Bud took a seat and skimmed a mediatron from the coffee table; it looked exactly like a dirty, wrinkled, blank sheet of paper. "'Annals of Self-Protection,'" he said, loud enough for everyone else in the place to hear him. The logo of his favorite meedfeed coalesced on the page. Mediaglyphics, mostly the cool animated ones, arranged themselves in a grid.
(Read more about Stephenson's mediatron)
Via DeepStuff; thanks to Thanks to Winchell Chung (@nyrath at Project Rho) for mentioning this.
Scroll down for more stories in the same category. (Story submitted 11/28/2015)
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