This article is from the WeChat public account: 爱 范 儿 (ID: ifanr) , author: Lee extraordinary, title figure from: IC photo
The new crown virus has become the biggest enemy in the world.
It allows many people to “self-prisoner” at home. The social animals ended their 996 life, but ushered in 007’s home office. They also forced elementary school students to give the internet class software a star.
It has forced us to suppress our desire to consume. The global film industry is facing a loss of USD 5 billion due to the epidemic, and the revenue of the global aviation industry may be reduced by USD 113 billion.
Picture from: New York Times
In this special period, no one seems to want to be connected with the virus, but some scientists want to use the virus to benefit humanity.
Angela Belcher, a professor of bioengineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (Angela Belcher) , has been successfully developed. A virus-made battery, and her ultimate dream is to be able to drive a car powered by a “virus battery.”
Manufacturing a virus battery
Virus batteries are not a recent technology. As early as 2009, a research team led by Angela Belcher had already used a virus with a diameter of only 6 nanometers to create a cell-sized miniature battery.
The study also attracted the interest of then-President Obama, who was invited to the White House to show Obama the virus battery. At the time, Obama was planning to invest $ 2 billion to support the development of new battery technology, and Belcher’s virus battery revealed a new direction in the battery field.
Picture from: wired
How do scientists use viruses to make batteries? What is the difference between a virus battery and a normal battery? To answer these questions, you first need to briefly understand how the battery works.
The discharge and charging of general lithium batteries is achieved by the internal movement of lithium ions between the positive electrode and the negative electrode through the electrolyte. The material used for the positive electrode is generally phosphate. It is also widely present in various life forms on Earth, so it is logically feasible to make batteries from living things.
But to make this battery, you first need to find a biological structure that can serve as electrodes and wires. At the beginning Belcher planned to use artificial nerve fibers because the nerve fiber ends of animals are naturalNano wires, but the cost and technical difficulty of this method are too high, and they can only be abandoned in the end.
Later Belcher found the answer on the abalone shell. They found that abalone can secrete a protein that can extract calcium carbonate molecules from mineral-rich water and let it align in the body to form an abalone shell. So Belcher transplanted the gene encoding the protein into the virus, giving the virus the ability to generate nanostructures to make electrodes and wires.
Abalone shell. Picture from: Monad Centre of Balance
In nature, it takes 15 years for an abalone to form a complete shell, and after genetic editing, it takes only two weeks for the virus to produce an electrode in the laboratory.
After analyzing millions of viruses, the research team finally selected M13 phage, a cigar-like virus with a diameter of only 6 nanometers and a length of 880 nanometers. In addition to transforming mechanical energy into electrical energy, this virus is simple in genetic material and easy to manipulate.
Similar to abalone, this virus generates a protein on the surface, which absorbs cobalt oxide particles and covers the shell. When millions of viruses are connected, they can form a cobalt oxide wire, which can be used as an electrode.
During this process, these front-line viruses are all alive. As we all know, viruses needThe host can survive, and researchers infect the virus with harmless bacteria to replicate the virus in large numbers.
Batteries manufactured in this way can not only improve the energy density, life and charging efficiency of the battery, but also make the production process more environmentally friendly. Compared with the carbon nanotube electrode material used in micro batteries, the energy storage efficiency of the electrode assembled by the virus has been doubled.
Antimony nanochain anodes developed by Purdue University
Using nanostructures for batteries as electrode materials has been considered in recent years as an important direction to break through the current bottleneck of lithium batteries. Because nanoelectrodes can absorb and release charged ions more and faster, batteries can be made smaller, lighter, and larger in capacity.
Konstantinos Gerasopoulos, a senior battery research scientist at the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory, said the benefit of using viruses is that they exist in a “nano” form, which is essentially a natural way to synthesize battery materials. template.
Of course you may be worried that if you use viruses to make batteries, in case a virus leaks and infects humans, isn’t it dangerous?
Belcher said that the viruses they use have been harmlessly genetically modified and will only infect specific bacterial hosts. They are not fatal and will only slow the growth of infected bacteria. In addition, this type of battery can be biodegradable after being discarded, and will not cause environmental pollution like the lithium batteries in the past.
Angela Belcher. Picture from: MIT News
After 10 years of research, Belcher ’s virus battery has made many new breakthroughs. The virus can be used with more than 150 materials to make products such as solar cells.
Although this virus battery can only power small electronic devices such as flashlights, laser pointers, watches and LED lights, Belcher has been trying to bring this technology to the market. She co-founded two biotech companies with others. Companies, Cambrios Technologies and Siluria Technologies, use viruses to synthesize nanowires for touch screens and convert carbon dioxide to ethylene.
Belcher’s prototype of the virus battery. Picture from: MIT Museum
However, it is still difficult to achieve the “viral battery-driven car” in Belcher ’s ideal. There are two major problems in the commercialization of viral batteries.
First, the size of the virus is too small, but the raw materials required for general battery factories are as high as tens of tons. It is not easy to achieve mass production at this scale with current biomolecular technology, but Gerasopoulos also stated that “this obstacle is not impossible in the future. get over”.
Tesla’s Super Battery Factory
Second, the performance of virus cells is not comparable to traditional batteries. Belcher used solar cells to make solar cells, but its technical efficiency cannot be compared with perovskite solar cells.
The previously mentioned abalone can arrange calcium molecules in order to form a shell. Although the virus battery borrows this principle, the current electrode structure of the virus assembly is still random. The Belcher team is studying how to make the virus generation more Ordered electrode structure.
Although virus batteries are not yet mature enough, Belcher said that her research hopes to use biotechnology to solve some currently unsolved problems.
Besides virus batteries, Belcher also used virus assembly technology to develop nanoparticles that can detect tumors. It can find cancerous tissues that are too small to be found by doctors, which greatly improves the detection of early cancer cells. .
When this virus nanoparticle enters the body, it will be attached to cancer cells in a targeted manner, and it will emit fluorescence under infrared light to mark the location of cancer cells. In experiments in mice, this technology successfully extended the lifespan of mice undergoing ovarian cancer surgery by 40%.
Humans started generating electricity with bacteria more than 100 years ago
The concept of making a battery from a virus may seem new, but you may not know that humans began to use the energy of microorganisms to generate electricity more than 100 years ago.
In 1911, British botanist Michael Cressé Potter discovered the large intestineBacillus can convert chemical energy in organic matter into electrical energy. He used platinum as an electrode, and used the culture liquid of E. coli and yeast to make the world’s first bacterial battery.
But it was not until 1976 that Japanese scientist Suzuki produced a modern-day microbial fuel cell (MFC) . By the 1980s, Peter Bennetto of the Royal College of London used sugar as a nutrient to allow bacteria to break down molecules in the battery pack, releasing electrons to move to the anode to generate electricity. It was calculated that this bacterial battery was more efficient than today’s solar cells 40% higher.
In the past decades, humans have discovered more bacteria that can generate electricity. From geobacteria used to remove underground uranium contaminants to anaerobic Enterococcus faecalis in our gut, all have the ability to transfer electrons to produce electricity.
Recently published in the “Nature” “air generator” (air-powered generator) research is to use microorganisms to produce The conductive protein nanowires formed a 7-micron film as an electrode.
When the protein nanowire is connected to the electrode, it can use the film to absorb moisture from the air. The water molecules are broken down into hydrogen ions and oxygen ions, causing the charge to accumulate on the top of the film. The difference in charge formed by the two electrodes allows the electron Flow to generate electricitytrong> Although the cost of the bacteria and the required nutrients is very low, the biocatalyst used in the production process is very expensive.
But scientists are solving these problems, and biofuel cells still have the possibility to replace traditional batteries. Especially for small wearable devices and pacemaker implanted electronic devices, it is very practical to provide power through this technology, and it is closer to commercial.
As Ai Faner said in a previous article, batteries limit our imagination for smart products.
Limited energy density of traditional lithium batteries has not achieved much breakthrough in the past 20 years. This has limited the development of electric vehicles and made all-electric large passenger planes a heaven and earth. Large aircraft such as the Boeing 737, so The required battery weight is even heavier than the body, which obviously cannot be commercialized.
Single battery of battery pack in electric vehicle
At the same time, the production of rare metals required for lithium batteries has a limited output. As human demand for batteries increases, costs continue to increase. Although human beings have tried to dive into deep sea mining, it has also brought a lot of controversies on environmental protection issues, and the prospect of commercialization is not clear.
Special mining machine for deep sea mining. Picture from: savethehighseas
If virus batteries and bacterial batteries can achieve mass production at low cost, then we will really have endless battery raw materials, and the battery field will also enter a whole new stage.
The sci-fi movie “The Matrix” once described a world powered entirely by bio-batteries, except that in the movie, humans are used as batteries to provide power to robots.
The future of the battery may be the body of the planet.
This article is from WeChat public account: 爱 范 儿 (ID: ifanr) , author: Lee extraordinary