Tiny batteries made from a strand of hair have been created.

TPO - Researchers have developed a battery as thin as a hair that can power robots as small as a punctuation mark.

A type of miniature battery that powers the robot (Photo: Michael Strano)

Zinc-air batteries capture oxygen from the surrounding environment and oxidize tiny amounts of zinc, a reaction that can generate 1 volt. This energy can then power sensors or small robotic arms that can lift and lower objects, such as insulin, directly into the cells of people with diabetes.

While microscopic robots have long been proposed for delivering drugs to specific locations in the body, powering them remains a challenging problem.

Many current designs utilize solar power, meaning they must be exposed to sunlight or controlled by lasers. But neither can penetrate deeply into the body because they must always be connected to a light source.

"If you want a micro-robot that can enter spaces inaccessible to humans, it needs to have a higher degree of autonomy," said senior study author Michael Strano, a chemical engineer at MIT.

The battery measures 0.01 millimeters.

This is one of the smallest batteries ever invented. In 2022, researchers in Germany described a millimeter-sized battery that could fit onto a microchip. Strano and his team's battery is about 10 times smaller, measuring just 0.1 millimeters long and 0.002 millimeters thick (the average human hair is about 0.1 millimeters thick).

This battery has two components, a zinc electrode and a platinum electrode. They are embedded in a polymer called SU-8. When zinc reacts with oxygen from the air, it creates an oxidation reaction that releases electrons. These electrons flow to the platinum electrode.

The batteries are manufactured using a process called photolithography, which uses photosensitive materials to transfer nanometer-sized patterns onto silicon wafers. This method is commonly used to manufacture semiconductors. It can quickly "print" 10,000 batteries on each silicon wafer, Strano and his colleagues reported in the journal Science Robotics.

In the new study, researchers used a wire to connect these tiny batteries to microscopic robots that Strano's lab also develops. They tested the ability of the battery to power a memristor.

They also used ultrathin batteries to power the clock circuitry, allowing the robot to track time and power two nanoscale sensors, one made of carbon nanotubes and the other of molybdenum disulfide. Microsensors like these can be dropped into pipes or other hard-to-reach places, according to the researchers.

The research team also used batteries to power an arm on one of the micro-robots. These tiny actuators could allow medical robots to operate inside the body to deliver medication at a specific time or location.

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According to Live Science