RESEARCH NEWS
Nanoscale capacitors pack in the power
ENERGY
Feynman’s famous 1959 proclamation “There’s
plenty of room at the bottom” largely referred
to the untapped storage ability for information
at the nanoscale. However, recently published
results by Banerjee and co-workers [Banerjee,
et al., Nat. Nanotechnol. (2009), doi:
10.1038/nnano.2009.37] show that this credo
applies to energy storage as well. The team
has created arrays of nano-scale capacitors
with an unprecedented 100 μF/cm2 capacitance,
more than 40 times larger than the equivalent
capacitance for a planar configuration.
The devices were made by the successive
application by atomic layer deposition of
metal (TiN) and insulator (Al2O3), onto a
nanoporous template of anodic aluminum
oxide to create a densely packed array of
How stiff are your joints?
NANOTECHNOLOGY
Atomic force microscopy (AFM) can
detect osteoarthritis several months
before conventional morphology-
based diagnostic techniques,
say researchers from Germany,
Switzerland, and Italy [Stolz, et al.,
Nat. Nanotechnol. (2009), doi:
10.1038/nnano.2008.410].
Osteoarthritis is a degenerative
disease that starts at the molecular
scale and progresses to the
macroscale in cartilage, a load-
bearing tissue located in bone joints.
There is currently no cure for the
disease and early detection and
the ability to monitor the disease’s
progression would be a major step
forwards.
Cartilage tissue is made up of a network of molecules
called collagen and proteoglycans. “In aging and
osteoarthritis the soft sugar molecules, which are
the proteoglycans, change their structure, but the
hard collagen fibrils are apparently not affected
at the early stages ”, explains Michael Stolz of the
University of Basel in Switzerland. “Therefore, in
order to detect early changes of osteoarthritis, the
diagnostic tool needs to be sensitive to the changes
in the proteoglycan moiety. Such analysis can be
these capacitors. This nanoscale design allows
for the desired combination of the typically
high power density provided by capacitors
(106 W/kg) along with the high energy density
available by tapping available surface area and
volume at the nanoscale (0.7 W*h/kg). In fact,
these devices provide 10 times the energy
storage density of commercially available
devices. According to Rubloff, one of the
authors, “While electrostatic capacitors, which
hold energy simply as electrical charge on the
surface of opposing sheets of metal, are well
known to provide high power, their energy
density has been low, and accordingly they
have not been considered as part of the storage
solutions requiring significant energy. Now
we have shown the potential of electrostatic
Nanoindentation on human cartilage
done by biochemical and/or histological analysis,
but such methods require biopsies and, therefore,
are destructive. Even a very small biopsy taken from
the hip- or knee joint would be a seeding point for
osteoarthritis.”
Another way of detecting cartilage deterioration
is by measuring the tissue’s stiffness. However,
current techniques only work at the micron scale,
by which time the disease has already progressed
by around five months. In this new work, the team
APRIL 2009 | VOLUME 12 | NUMBER 4
nanocapacitors to compete with conventional
electrochemical capacitors, bringing a new
player onto the field of storage solutions.”
These new nanocapacitor devices may soon
be coming to the market. The technology is
being developed for mass production as a
panel similar in shape to solar panels. These
panels could be then integrated with energy
generation technologies such as solar cells or
wind, to capture and store the time-varying,
unpredictable energy generated. The unique
combination of high energy, high power, and
quick recharge times, coupled with the low
cost manufacturability, shows great promise
for this technology in next-generation energy
storage.
David Hecht
uses an indentation-type atomic force
microscope (IT-AFM) to measure
stiffness on the nanoscale and hence
detect the disease at a much earlier
stage. Here, an AFM tip is pressed into
the material and the response is directly
measured.
When the researchers studied mice
with the phenotype for osteoarthritis,
they detected differences in stiffness
of cartilage tissue as early as one
month into the mouse’s lifetime
when compared with that of normal
mice. Tests on humans undergoing hip
replacements also indicated a marked
change in nanoscale stiffness, even in
the early stages of osteoarthritis.
The next step is to develop a user-friendly in situ
indentation type-AFM for clinics. In the future the
team also hopes to study tumors, but there are
some major questions to be answered first. “It is not
so clear how a change in the mechanical properties
of breast tissue in a tumor relates to its functional
role in the body. This leads to the difficulty of how
to interpret measured changes. Moreover, cancerous
tissue is much more complex compared to cartilage”,
says Stolz.
Katerina Busuttil
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