Q&A with Professor Valeria Nicolosi from Trinity College Dublin

In this week’s Q&A, Kehlan talks with Professor Valeria Nicolosi from Trinity College Dublin. Prof Nicolosi and her team have recently been awarded €2.5m by the European Research Council to further the development of a high-technology miniature battery that can be easily hidden, including under the skin.

Tell us what you’re working on?

I’m principal investigator at the Nanoscience Institute, CRANN and the Material Science Centre at AMBER.

So what I do is related to use of 2-D nanomaterials, the thinnest materials known to man, for high energy storage devices.

We basically take very exotic and novel materials that are very attractive for the creation of new types of batteries and begin to create them.

The €2.5m that we just received from the European Research Council will go to taking these materials a step forward.

We will look to develop this in order for them to 3-D printed into any device.

The idea would be that in five years’ time we would be able to use our software with a 3-D printer and design a full phone with the battery already made into the phone, no separate parts needed. It will customisable and can be done in less than half an hour.

However, there are other applications for this, including the ability to do this with devices in the biomedical field and devices which can go inside the body. We’ve been working on this for some time now.

Within that time we learned how to manipulate and process them down to the nano-scale. This allowed us to discover which materials had their pros and cons.

We can now create free- standing transparent batteries because we learned how to develop them and how best exploit the benefits of the materials.

This has a lot of variables in terms of how it gets used?

Oh absolutely, yes. The range of materials that can be used to create the devices has also grown massively, as well.

So much so that we can now pick and choose the types of materials which best suit our needs. The materials can be found in a phone or changed to better suit something which may end up inside a person.

Batteries are not all the same. It depends on the use of them and the amount of energy needed to keep a device going. When we talk about thin materials, most people might think about graphene.

The family that we use for printing is very similar to graphene in that it is just one atom thick. That family has about 500 different possible traits. Some parts are better for conducting electricity, while others are better suited to the storage of energy.

What happens in the next two or three years with your research and designs?

We’ll be purchasing a very sophisticated 3-D printer. The idea is that within five years we should be able to 3-D print the battery and the device together — no need for a physical assembly.