Video The UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) and the University of Bristol have built a diamond battery capable of delivering power for thousands of years.
The university had an idea for a battery powered by carbon-14, the longest-lived radioactive isotope of carbon with a half-life of around 5,700 years. For safety reasons, they wanted to encapsulate it in synthetic diamond so there was no risk of human harm, and so went to the UKAEA for help.
The result is a battery around the same diameter as a standard lithium-ion coin battery, albeit much thinner, which is capable of powering devices for thousands of years. As the carbon-14 decays, the electrons produced are focused by the diamond shell and can be used to power devices - but only if they require very little power.
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"This is about UK innovation and no one's ever done this before," said Professor Tom Scott, professor in materials at the University of Bristol. "We can offer a technology where you never have to replace the battery because the battery will literally, on human timescales, last forever."
Working together, the team built a plasma deposition system at UKAEA's Culham Campus. This lays down thin layers of synthetic diamond around the battery's carbon-14 heart. The team is now trying to scale up the machinery so that larger batteries can be developed.
"Diamond batteries offer a safe, sustainable way to provide continuous microwatt levels of power. They are an emerging technology that uses a manufactured diamond to safely encase small amounts of carbon-14," said Sarah Clark, director of Tritium Fuel Cycle at UKAEA.
The first use case for the technology would be extreme environments like powering small satellites (the European Space Agency funded some of the research) or sensors on the sea floor. But the team also envisaged the technology being implanted in humans to power devices such as pacemakers or cochlear implants that could receive power for longer than the human carrying them would need. ®