MIT professor Paula T. Hammond and her fellow researchers have set her sights on tiny virus-based microbatteries about half the size of a human cell.

When we first focused our sights on her research at MIT, Professor Paula T. Hammond was making headway on a new thin film fuel cell material soon to succeed Nafion. This time the renowned Bayer Professor of Chemical Engineering, along with the ceramics specialist Professor Yet-Ming Chiang, Angela M. Belcher, and other scientists affiliated with the MIT Energy Initiative, is working on a new energy storage solution , one that could harness the power of tiny virus-based microbatteries about half the size of a human cell.

Convinced that this technology can one day power a myriad of miniature electronics, Hammond and her colleagues have even worked out a way to instantly forge and install these nano-devices. Their application, she believes, will range from labs-on-a-chip to implantable medical sensors.

Batteries consist of two opposite electrodes -- an anode and cathode -- separated by an electrolyte. Using a common technique called soft lithography as well as the self-assembling virus cultivation, the MIT team created both the anode and the electrolyte.

"The resulting electrode arrays exhibit full electrochemical functionality," they concluded in their Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) paper on August 18. "To our knowledge, this is the first instance in which microcontact printing has been used to fabricate and position microbattery electrodes and the first use of virus-based assembly in such a process."

For more on this and other ongoing MIT alternative energy research go here.

Originally published on GoodCleanTech.