By Christina Veiga
cveiga@MiamiHerald.com
The NanoTritium can travel into enemy territory, plunge to the bottom of the ocean and even settle into the human heart. And it keeps going, even through extreme temperatures and vibration, for 20 years or more.
Just the size of an adult’s thumb, NanoTritium is a different kind of battery — and now it’s available commercially. Homestead-based City Labs, the small high-tech company that created NanoTritium, says it’s the first time such a power source has gone on sale to end-users — most likely companies — that don’t have specialized training or separate regulatory approval. Florida International University alum Peter Cabauy and University of Miami alum Denset Serralta say their low-power battery can be used to run micro-electronics anywhere that’s hard, dangerous or expensive to reach.
Think: sensors on deep-water oil drills, in medical devices implanted into the body, even hidden in a wall in a spy hangout. In fact, the company is already looking at the military applications for its product: City Labs has been awarded a $1 million Air Force contract for a higher-power, customized battery. (Cabauy said he couldn’t discuss specifics of the lab’s military contract.)
“Basically they can be used for items like sensors where you cannot maintain them but you need them to be operating for a long time,” said Serralta, chief technology officer of City Labs.
The device is expected to be valued in the “couple thousand dollar range” at first, Cabauy said, but the price should go down as the company produces more of the devices.
What makes the NanoTritium so resistant and long-lasting is the way it’s made. This is a betavoltaic power source, meaning it’s powered by a radioactive element. Whereas normal batteries are powered by chemical processes, the NanoTritium is powered by physical processes of one of the most benign radioisotopes: tritium.
Another way to think about betavoltaics is to think of a solar cell, said University of Miami Professor Joshua Kohn, a materials physicist, who is not involved in the project. But instead of absorbing photons from the sun to create energy, betavoltaics absorb radioactive particles, he said.
Kohn called the idea of a commercially-available betavoltaic “intriguing.”
“I’m skeptical it will be a market-maker, but it certainly has some niches it could fill,” he said.
“It’s an old idea that goes back to the 50s and 60s, and I guess it was abandoned back then because they had to use a more dangerous material, ” he said.
That’s not an issue with tritium, which is already used to make exit signs and divers watches glow. The electrons it emits can be stopped by something as flimsy as a sheet of paper.
“If you go on the Metrorail, I counted about 100 [exit] signs through all the stations. And they [each] have, oh, about 20 times the amount of tritium [as the battery], and it’s in gaseous form,” said Cabauy, CEO of City Labs.
The tritium in NanoTritium is solid, “so even if this gets broken or punctured, it all stays inside,” he said.
UM’s Kohn said low-power batteries are being developed out of many materials, even algae, for all kinds of uses, such as tracking store merchandise.
Cabauy and Serralta didn’t originally set out to create such a battery. With few high-tech jobs available in South Florida, they first set out to create a company that could provide science and engineering students with employment.
Just the size of an adult’s thumb, NanoTritium is a different kind of battery — and now it’s available commercially. Homestead-based City Labs, the small high-tech company that created NanoTritium, says it’s the first time such a power source has gone on sale to end-users — most likely companies — that don’t have specialized training or separate regulatory approval. Florida International University alum Peter Cabauy and University of Miami alum Denset Serralta say their low-power battery can be used to run micro-electronics anywhere that’s hard, dangerous or expensive to reach.
Think: sensors on deep-water oil drills, in medical devices implanted into the body, even hidden in a wall in a spy hangout. In fact, the company is already looking at the military applications for its product: City Labs has been awarded a $1 million Air Force contract for a higher-power, customized battery. (Cabauy said he couldn’t discuss specifics of the lab’s military contract.)
“Basically they can be used for items like sensors where you cannot maintain them but you need them to be operating for a long time,” said Serralta, chief technology officer of City Labs.
The device is expected to be valued in the “couple thousand dollar range” at first, Cabauy said, but the price should go down as the company produces more of the devices.
What makes the NanoTritium so resistant and long-lasting is the way it’s made. This is a betavoltaic power source, meaning it’s powered by a radioactive element. Whereas normal batteries are powered by chemical processes, the NanoTritium is powered by physical processes of one of the most benign radioisotopes: tritium.
Another way to think about betavoltaics is to think of a solar cell, said University of Miami Professor Joshua Kohn, a materials physicist, who is not involved in the project. But instead of absorbing photons from the sun to create energy, betavoltaics absorb radioactive particles, he said.
Kohn called the idea of a commercially-available betavoltaic “intriguing.”
“I’m skeptical it will be a market-maker, but it certainly has some niches it could fill,” he said.
“It’s an old idea that goes back to the 50s and 60s, and I guess it was abandoned back then because they had to use a more dangerous material, ” he said.
That’s not an issue with tritium, which is already used to make exit signs and divers watches glow. The electrons it emits can be stopped by something as flimsy as a sheet of paper.
“If you go on the Metrorail, I counted about 100 [exit] signs through all the stations. And they [each] have, oh, about 20 times the amount of tritium [as the battery], and it’s in gaseous form,” said Cabauy, CEO of City Labs.
The tritium in NanoTritium is solid, “so even if this gets broken or punctured, it all stays inside,” he said.
UM’s Kohn said low-power batteries are being developed out of many materials, even algae, for all kinds of uses, such as tracking store merchandise.
Cabauy and Serralta didn’t originally set out to create such a battery. With few high-tech jobs available in South Florida, they first set out to create a company that could provide science and engineering students with employment.
Read more here: http://www.miamiherald.com/2012/07/09/2912503/homesteads-city-labs-makes-first.html#storylink=cpy
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