• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

New Ion Speed Record Could Lead To Faster Charging Batteries

November 20, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

Researchers have discovered how to make ions – electrically charged atoms – move ten times faster than they would do in water alone. It is being called an “ion superhighway” and it opens up the possibility of new technological developments, from batteries that can charge faster than ever before to biosensors and soft robots.

The creation of these ion superhighways was possible thanks to some molecular planning. The team used certain molecules capable of concentrating the ions along certain nanochannels within the conducting material.

Advertisement

“Being able to control these signals that life uses all the time in a way that we’ve never been able to do is pretty powerful,” senior author Brian Collins, from Washington State University, said in a statement.  “This acceleration could also have benefits for energy storage, which could be a big impact.”

Ions are atoms that have either lost or gained some electrons. That’s why they are charged. Electrons are the negatively charged fundamental particles that exist in all atoms and their motion is the transmission of electricity. The movement of electrons and ions was not fully understood, but this work set out to rectify that.

“We found that the ions that were flowing all right in the conductor, but they had to go through this matrix, like a rat’s nest of pipelines for electrons to flow. That was slowing down the ions,” Collins said.

The researchers created a nanometer-sized channel to let the ions flow without being disturbed, but they first had to get the ions into the channel. The solution for that came from nature, by copying how cells let ions in through their walls.

Advertisement

The team lined the channel with molecules that either loved or hated water – or in technical terms, hydrophilic or hydrophobic. When the hydrophilic molecules made the channel, the ions would zip through at the fastest recorded speed for ions in any material. But when the molecules were hydrophobic, the ions would not even enter the channel. The team found that a chemical reaction could regulate the flow by switching the molecules from hydrophilic to hydrophobic.

It works the other way around too. The team created a sensor that detected a chemical reaction near the channel opening – simply because the reaction interrupted the flow of ions, stopping the current a computer was measuring. This could be used to sense pollution or study the human nervous system, among many other applications.

“The next step is really to learn all the fundamental mechanisms of how to control this ion movement and bring this new phenomenon to technology in a variety of ways,” Collins added.

The study is published in the journal Advanced Materials.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Two UK tech figures plan to row the Atlantic for charity supporting minority entrepreneurs
  2. Microsoft now more focused on ‘killing Zoom’ than Slack, says Stewart Butterfield
  3. Taiwan central bank says currency stable, flags more modest intervention
  4. Satellite Launched Last Year Becomes One Of The Brightest Things In The Sky

Source Link: New Ion Speed Record Could Lead To Faster Charging Batteries

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Quantum “Schrödinger’s Cat” Survives For Mind-Blowing 23 Minutes In Record-Breaking Experiment
  • World-First Estimate Shows Over 13 Million Babies Born Through Assisted Reproduction
  • Californian Wild Pigs Found With Bright Blue Flesh, Officials Warn Public To “Be Aware”
  • Dancing Cockatoos, Spider Schlongs, And Will I Be Hit By An Asteroid?
  • NASA Releases Closest Ever Images Of The Sun, Snapped As Probe Travels Through Its Atmosphere
  • Grizzly Adams: The Wild Truth Behind The Man, The Myth, And The Beard
  • Sergei Krikalev: A Cosmonaut Left Stranded In Space When The Soviet Union Collapsed
  • “We Have No Idea”: Decades-Old Mystery About Great White Sharks Just Got Even Stranger
  • Sharks Don’t Have Bones To Fossilize, So How Do We Know Megalodon’s Size?
  • The Year’s Best Meteor Shower Is About To Hit Its Peak – How To Bag Yourself A “Fireball”
  • “Smoking Gun” Causing Parts Of Antarctic Ocean To Shine Weirdly Bright In Satellite Images Discovered
  • Watch: Endangered Foa’s Red Colobus Monkey Caught On Film For The First Time
  • Most Distant Black Hole Ever Confirmed From 500 Million Years After The Big Bang
  • Scientists Used Virtual Reality To Alter People’s Lucid Dreams In Mindboggling Feat
  • Vesna Vulović: The Woman Who Fell Over 10,000 Meters And Miraculously Survived
  • Why Do Lion Cubs Have Spots?
  • 80 Years On, Chilling Photos Of The Hiroshima Bombing Remind Us Why Nuclear Weapons Are Terrifying
  • Four Radioactive Wasp Nests Have Been Found At A Nuclear Facility In South Carolina
  • Ancient Burial Practices
  • Why Do Arms And Legs “Fall Asleep”?
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version