Microbatteries with tobacco mosaic virus templated electrodes

The successful demonstration of a MEMS-fabricated battery incorporating viral nanostructures to increase the effective electrode area is reported in this paper. Nickel-zinc microbatteries with nanostructured cathodes utilizing self-assembly of the tobacco mosaic virus (TMV) have been fabricated and characterized. A novel packaging scheme was created to investigate the effects of TMV coatings as well as microbattery geometry. Addition of the TMV structures increases the reactive surface area by an order of magnitude and enhances the battery performance. The capacity of a TMV modified battery was improved by a factor of six over planar electrode geometries. Appropriate charge-discharge behavior was observed for various designs, showing a twofold increase in capacity for an equivalent decrease in electrode spacing.