Scientists have combined the principle of operation of portable batteries and devices for obtaining energy from the environment and, eliminating the disadvantages of both methods, made the robotic electric car move without assistance and many times more efficiently.
The University of Pennsylvania's School of Engineering and Applied Sciences has created a unique robot car. The device is charged due to the destruction of chemical bonds in metals, which it produces on its own and "eats" under the "sauce" of a polymer hydrogel. A study that combines two fundamental principles of charging electrical devices is published in ACS Energy Letters.
Mobile electrical devices are powered by portable batteries or devices that convert environmental energy into electricity.
An obvious and unavoidable disadvantage of batteries is that their resource is limited by their physical size. Power sufficient to operate electrical devices can be obtained by increasing the volume and mass of the battery. However, most of the stored energy will be spent on moving the battery itself. In the case of miniature robots, the battery is clearly not a favorite.
If you use a natural energy converter, such as a solar panel, the bad luck with the carrying capacity will smoothly go into the sunset. But the solved problem will immediately be replaced by new ones: insufficient power and scanty conversion speed. The couple will be embarrassedly joined by the limited operating conditions of the converter: there will be little sense from the same solar panel in cloudy weather.
In the new development, scientists have applied the well-known principle of obtaining energy through the destruction of chemical bonds and the formation of new ones. Something similar happens in redox reactions in lithium-ion batteries. The difference is that the source of electrons was a metal surface on which the electric car moved.
The built-in cathode, like an anteater's nose, “probed” the surface in search of “food” - electrons. The conductive medium, the electrolyte, was a hydrogel made of polymer chains, with which the electric car generously lubricated its path. During the experiment, the metal surface was covered with a micro-rust. But the power achieved was 10 times that of a solar panel and 13 times that of a lithium-ion battery.
As conceived by the developers, such electric robots in the future will be able to independently extract metal "food" from the environment and fully provide themselves with energy.
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