Human Flower Project

Where’s a Nanoflower When You Need One?

Chinese chemists have made a floral breakthrough and created a better battery, but not in time for millions of people across the U.S., still in the dark after Hurricane Ike.

Conventional (?) flower flashlight

Photo: Schylling Toys

This morning my 87-year-old mother and 94-year-old father stopped by a local hardware store looking for D batteries. They’d tried three other stores: all sold out.

“Yes, we have some,” said the clerk, “but we’re limiting each customer to only eight.” So eight it was.

My folks have been without electricity since Sunday. They don’t live in Galveston or Houston, but three states and 1000 miles away from where Hurricane Ike made landfall. A bizarre confluence of weather conditions—hot surface temperatures and a cold front descending from the northwest—met Overland Ike as it reached the Ohio River Valley. It produced a 5 hour windstorm in Louisville, KY, my folks’ hometown. More than 200,000 people there are still without electricity four days later.

One sister-in-law (an angel of mercy—still without power herself) brought by three battery powered lanterns for my parents to use in the lengthening “interim.” My mother’s solution of candlelight, while romantic, has already set off the smoke alarm twice.

They may be inconvenienced, but they’re not alone. In the Greater Houston area 1.3 million people are still without power (hey Beaumont, Centerpoint Energy is predicting your lights will be back on October 6).  Ike and his only slightly older cousin, Hurricane Gustav, together blacked out 1.5 million homes across Louisiana. And in the aftermath of Ike, power’s still out for hundreds of thousands of people in Arkansas, Missouri, Pennsylvania, and Ohio (900,000 still without lights in the Buckeye State alone as of Wednesday).

That’s a lot of flashlights, flashlights dimming, and dead batteries.

Unfortunately, nanoflower technology is still in the bud stage. Chemists at Peking University have just published a paper on the superiority of “manganese oxide nanoflower/carbon nanotube array” for storing and conducting battery power.

Tiny flower-shaped clusters of manganese oxide

prolong the life of batteries, and (ahem) here’s how!

Image: American Chemical Society

“In the new study, scientists first grew clusters of carbon nanotubes, strands of pure carbon 50,000 times thinner than a human hair, that are known to have superior electrical conductivity. The scientists then deposited manganese oxide onto the nanotubes using a simple, low-cost coating technique called “electrodeposition,” resulting in nano-sized clusters that resemble tiny dandelions under an electron microscope.”

Nanoflower

Photo: American Chemical Society

“The result was a battery system with higher energy storage capacity, longer life, and greater efficiency than conventional battery materials.”

People from Port Arthur, Texas, to Butler, Ohio, sure could use several fields of those energetic dandelions about now.

We suppose that readers affected by the weekend’s storms are cut-off from their Human Flower Project connections. Of if the power’s back on, maybe you’re doing something more essential, like bailing out the livingroom.

Good luck everybody.

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