Self-powered nanosystems based on nanofuel cell

Abstract

With the rapid progress in researches on nano-materials, a dramatically increasing number of nanoscale functional devices are developed, including nano-biosensors, nano-photoelectric sensors. Most of these nanoscale devices rely on external power supply to work sustainably. Although an energy storage unit is a choice for powering nanodevices, the large dimension of existed power sources has become one limited factor for the miniaturization of independently workable nanodevices. Therefore, a nanoscale power source capable of harvesting energy from the environment is an essential solution for building a “self-powered” nanosystem which is an integration of functional nanodevices and nano- enabled energy scavenging technologies. The successful development of such nanoscale power sources that match with nanodevices is significant for constructing self-powered nanosystems. The self-powered nanosystems will be widely used in industrial fields such as sensors networks, environmental and infrastructural monitoring, portable electronics, and healthcare. Referring to recent vigorously studies on exploiting self-powered nanosystems based on functional nanodevices and nano-batteries, it is obvious that the preparation of nano fuel cell is the key to the establishment of self-powered nanosystems. Fuel cells have many advantages over conventional batteries, such as high energy conversion efficiency, quick startup ability under low temperature, high energy density, and the feature of environmental friendly. What’s more, through the technical route of fuel cells, chemical and biochemical energy, the most abundant energy available in nature or in vivo biosystems, can be converted to electrical energy from fuels such as methanol and glucose, which is meaningful to the development of in vivo implantable nanosystems. Therefore, more and more attentions of the scientific community in fields of nanoenergy and nanosystems have been paid to the researches on micro and even nano scale miniaturization of fuel cells. Our group has done some studies on the proton exchange properties of single perfluorinated sulfonic acid resin (Nafion) nanowire, and on the nano proton exchange membrane fuel cells. We also have built a number of self-powered nanosystems based on such nano fuel cells. In this review article, we begin with the introduction to the proton exchange properties of Nafion nanowires, which is based on the works of our and other research groups. Then we briefly introduce nanofuel, nanobiofuel, hybrid nano biofuel cells, and self-powered nanosystems that are powered by these fuel cells, which represents a new self-powering approach in nanotechnology. We also briefly sum up the state of the art, point out confronting problems, and prospect possible trends in the researches on self-powered nanosystems. This work shows the feasibility of building self-powered nanosystems for biological sciences, environmental monitoring, defense technology and even personal electronics.