A "vertebrate" battery

Engineers at Columbia University in the United States have developed a flexible lithium-ion battery that takes the form of a human spine. This innovation would allow our smartphones, tablets, TV screens and other electronic gadgets to be able to change shape without cutting off their power supply!

Well, it's time for the gym! So touch your feet, legs outstretched, balanced on logs, ten reels with arms, unzip and we put it back! Performed the artist and comedian Tom November, in one of his songs entitled Pathways Health.

Wise words, inviting us to practice a regular physical activity, to stretch our joints energetically. And especially to relax our backs to rust our vertebrae, found a professor of materials science and engineering at Columbia University in the United States, in the middle of a yoga session.

For Yuan Yang, our contortionist researcher, it was a revelation! He decides to draw inspiration from the human spine to create a new prototype of a completely flexible lithium-ion battery. This rechargeable "vertebrate" battery consists of solid components assembled together.

To schematize the concept, we find electrodes that are formed of thin superimposed copper lamellae corresponding in some way to our vertebrae. Graphite cathodes integrate each block with energetic spinal cord system, anodes consisting of cobalt dioxide and lithium. On the other hand, the exact composition of the materials that keep these vertebrae energetic with each other, as the discs and ligaments of our spine can do, is being held incommunicado by scientists at Columbia University, in full patent filing. "Because of the high proportion of active materials in the whole structure, our battery offers a very high energy density, superior to all that we know," says Professor Yuan Yang in his publications.

The laboratory tests on a very small prototype consisted in inflicting multiple twists on the articulated device in order to introduce it into a connected watch. After a hundred cycles of charging and discharging, the vertebrate battery still retained 94% of its initial capacity. "We are still a long way from commercialization," said Columbia engineers who expect their innovation will finally make "smartphones, tablets and TV screens fully flexible", not to mention to provide electricity, while flexibility, our connected clothes and other super high tech objects with polymorphic properties, which will change shape at will and without doubt, the way we use them.