Thursday, October 24, 2002
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Bangalore
scientist makes hearts Can you think of a pacemaker without any battery? Certainly not; at least with current technology. But a strong possibility of realising such a device exists in future, thanks to a major technological breakthrough achieved by a Bangalore scientist. Using bundles of microscopic one-dimensional carbon tubes, Physicist Dr A K Sood and his student Shankar Ghosh at Indian Institute of Science (IISc) have developed a device for the first time in the world, which if successfully exploited on a commercial basis, can lead to the creation of battery-less pacemaker.
Tracking blood flow inside arteries and veins in real time, understanding turbulent motion, one of the unsolved mysteries in science, and manufacturing high quality advanced composite are some other exciting application potential for the breakthrough. The IISc team has come out with the world’s first flow sensor that can give an electric response in presence of flowing liquid by automatically generating electrical charge from liquid flow. For instance when kept inside the blood vessel, the device can generate electricity from blood flow to run on continuously without any battery. “It opens up the possibility of many exciting applications. We have applied for an Indian patent on the technology and planning to get an US patent as well,” Dr Sood told Deccan Herald on the sidelines of the Third World Academy of Sciences (TWAS) meeting here. Lilliputian single-walled carbon tubes having dimension in the range of millionth of a millimeter (nanometer) holds the key to the technology. Manufactured at the laboratory of former IISc director Dr C N R Rao’s laboratory, the carbon nanotubes were used to create the sensor with high sensitivity. Explaining how the device functions, Dr Sood said that due to some unique changes in the internal structure of carbon, the tubes generates huge amount of electric charge in presence of flowing liquid, which could be measured from outside. “Generation of electric charges gives the sensor more flexibility which is not available with flow sensors currently available.” Continuing with its investigations on carbon nano-tubes, the team later on observed that the mechanical resilience of carbon tubes are completely reversible even under pressure as high as 250 kilo-bar, widening the scope for applications in high-pressure steel and composite materials. |
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