The scaly nature of snakeskin will serve as the basis for flexible batteries

New battery design developed at the Korea Institute of Engineering and Materials

Machinery and Materials), promises someinteresting possibilities for storing energy, thanks to the ability to bend and stretch like a snake. This ability to mimic the behavior of individual scales could lead to the snake-inspired battery finding its way into the world of soft robotics, wearable electronics, or other fields where flexibility is an important attribute.

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The innovative new battery design has beendesigned as a more flexible energy storage solution in wearable devices and robots. The idea is for a series of rigid but small batteries to connect together to form an overlapping scale-like structure that can bend and deform with the device.

To do this, scientists used smallhexagonal-shaped lithium-ion batteries as &#8220;scales&#8221; and connected them using polymer and copper materials, which also act as a hinge, ensuring stable deformations without damage. The shape of each of the hexagonal cells has also been carefully optimized to maximize the overall battery capacity.

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The team's tests have shown that a stretchable lithium battery can maintain its performance even when flexed and stretched by 90% for more than 36,000 cycles.

Thanks to these unique capabilities, the batterycan find applications, for example, in search and rescue robots that need to wade through narrow spaces in natural disasters, or multifunctional soft robots with artificial muscles.

Source:eurekalert, liebertpub

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