A self-destructing battery that is capable of delivering 2.5 volts and dissolving in water in under 30 minutes was recently created by Iowa State University as part of a growing field known as transient electronics.
Such self-destructing devices are usually the stuff of spy movies like "Mission: Impossible," but Reza Montazami, a mechanical engineering assistant professor at Iowa State, has been working on such technologies in the transient electronics field for years.
Such technologies could help keep military secrets from falling into enemy hands or prevent patients of going through the pain of having medical devices removed, the university explained in a statement last week.
The dissolving lithium-ion battery, which can power a desktop calculator for about 15 minutes, is the first battery in the transient electronics field that demonstrates power, stability, and shelf life for regular use, Montazami said.
"Any device without a transient power source isn't really transient," said Montazami, who is also an associate of the U.S. Department of Energy's Ames Laboratory. "This is a battery with all the working components. It's much more complex than our previous work with transient electronics."
The Iowa State team's work on the self-destructing battery was published in a recent issue of the Journal of Polymer Science, Part B: Polymer Physics.
"Unlike conventional electronics that are designed to last for extensive periods of time, a key and unique attribute of transient electronics is to operate over a typically short and well-defined period, and undergo fast and, ideally, complete self-deconstruction and vanish when transiency is triggered," the scientists wrote in their paper, noted Iowa State.
Engadget writer Mariella Moon wrote that the battery developed by Iowa State is just a first step in the creation of more powerful batteries and devices in the transient electronics field.
"The one-millimeter-thick and five-millimeter-long device uses typical lithium-ion technology," Moon wrote for Engadget. "Unlike typical batteries though, it's encased in degradable polymer composite that swells and eventually breaks apart in water."
"While promising, it will probably take some time before the team can make a version that can power more sophisticated electronics. They still have to figure out how to scale up a battery that has multiple layers and has such a complex structure," Moon continued.