Miniaturized Reverse Electrodialysis Biobattery for Biomedical Applications

In recent years, the outstanding advancements in fields such as nanotechnology, bioengineering and biomedical engineering have enhanced the quality and diversity of implantable medical devices. Efficient working of these devices demands the presence of a stable and continuous electrical source. Although numerous power approaches have been investigated throughout the years, there still exist some serious challenges to overcome on developing a reliable and long-term source of energy that could sustain an uninterrupted supply with the safest possible specifications. In the light of these, the main objective of this study was to construct a miniaturized bio-battery design that aims to produce power by harnessing the Gibbs Free Energy of Mixing between two different physiological streams that contain different salt concentrations inside the human body. For that, the two streams were introduced into a bio-battery that captures energy by Reverse Electrodialysis (RED) that could charge an implantable device, such as a cardiac pacemaker, inside a human body. The results have shown that the bio-battery was able to produce stable power up to 3 µW at around 0.2 V with the corresponding concentration differences and relatively low flow rates (0.6 mL/min) which is promising for a compact bio-battery that having nearly 100-fold less membrane area than the commercialized RED-based battery systems.