Future pacemakers could be powered by artificial eels. A soft, fleshy, electric eel-inspired battery could be the key to creating next generation medical implants.
The team behind the power source have been able to produce 110 volts, but they say they could be on the verge of driving that up several-fold.
To create this power, at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland and his colleagues used thousands of hydrogels spread across a thin, pliable surface in evenly-spaced bubbles and then filled the space between two sheets of the material with a saline solution.
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The ions in that solution created friction and electricity in the gel layers, providing 110 volts of power, about the same amount of power provided by many wall sockets. The structure of this new material is similar to the layers of skin that produce an electric eel鈥檚 deadly jolt.
The team presented their latest results at the a meeting of the聽Biophysical Society in San Francisco on 19 February. This research builds on previous work by making the gels thinner and giving them a larger contact area, which increased the power capacity. The researchers say that improvements in the way the gels repel ionized atoms could further drive up the voltage produced.
鈥淚t is reasonable to expect that making the gels even thinner would further increase the power density of the system,鈥� Guha says.
110 volts is not enough to be used in medical devices right now, according to Guha. 鈥淓ven though we are able to produce large voltages, the currents generated are quite low,鈥� he says. But the team believes that a 40-fold increase in power production聽鈥� and a corresponding increase in current 鈥� is possible.
Because the power source is soft and flexible, it could be integrated into existing tissue, providing a continuous power source for a pacemaker or other medical device without the need to periodically replace the battery. And all this is possible with a fairly common 3D printer, some soft gel material, and a little salt water.
Nature
Read more: Bendy implant harnesses the power of your beating heart
