The next frontier of micro-power: the pee-battery
You’ve got Rwandans using human feces from prisons to produce heat and electricity, and now scientists at Singapore’s Institute of Bioengineering and Nanotechnology have developed a cheap paper battery that runs on urine.
I half-laughed reading this article, but you’ve got to admit that the idea is intriguing. Researchers have figured out a way to test for diseases in urine using biochips that are powered by the same urine being tested.
The end result could be the production of “cheap, disposable credit card-sized biochips for disease detection,” with a battery that can be easily integrated into such devices, “supplying electricity upon contact with biofluids such as urine.”
Using just .2 ml of urine, the scientists were able to generate 1.5 volts and a maximum power output of 1.5 mW.
Sounds like a golden opportunity to me. The research appeared in the Journal of Micromechanics and Microengineering.
Tyler Hamilton is editor-in-chief of Corporate Knights magazine and a business columnist for the Toronto Star, Canada's largest daily newspaper. In addition to this Clean Break blog, Tyler writes a weekly column of the same name that discusses trends, happenings and innovators in the clean technology and green energy market. This blog is a personal project started in April 2005. It is not an official blog of the newspaper.
