Technology can aid us in keeping our hearts beating properly. Apparently, researchers from Buffalo laboratory are crafting silver nanoparticles to keep our hearts’ beating quite powerful and stable. The nanoparticles are claimed to be a part of a new family of materials being developed in the laboratory of SUNY Distinguished Professor and Greatbatch Professor of Advanced Power Sources, Esther Takeuchi, PhD, who created the lithium/silver vanadium oxide battery.
The battery was alleged to be a chief aspect in fetching implantable cardiac defibrillators (ICDs) into manufacturing in the late 1980s. ICDs appeared to shock the heart into a standard rhythm when it apparently goes into fibrillation. After 20 years, with over 3,00,000 of these units being embedded each year, most of them seem to be motorized by the battery system developed and enhanced by Takeuchi and her team.
ICD batteries, generally are said to carry on for five to seven years. But she and her husband and co-investigator, SUNY Distinguished Teaching Professor of Chemistry Kenneth Takeuchi, PhD, and Amy Marschilok, PhD, UB research assistant professor of chemistry, are apparently seeking out better battery systems, by enhancing bimetallic materials at the atomic level.
Until now, their outcomes appear to exhibit that they may formulate their materials to be 15,000 times more functional upon preliminary battery use owing to in-situ production of metallic silver nanoparticles. Apparently, their new technique to material design can enable growth of higher-power, longer-life batteries than was formerly feasible. These and other enhancements may be augmenting interest in battery materials and the innovative devices that they may make promising.
Takeuchi mentioned, “We may be heading toward a time when we can make batteries so tiny that they — and the devices they power — can simply be injected into the body.”
Right now, her team is discovering the means to augment the reliability of the new materials they are planning for ICDs. The materials can be examined over weeks and months in laboratory ovens that seem to imitate body temperature of 37 degrees Celsius.
The researcher clarifies that the new and enhanced batteries for biomedical applications may possibly, in a realistic way, transfigure treatments for a few of the most unrelenting diseases by crafting viable devices that could be entrenched in the brain to treat stroke and mental illness, in the spine to treat chronic pain or in the vagal nerve system to treat migraines, Alzheimer’s disease, anxiety, even obesity.
