Chapter 31: Natural Exposure

Early April

It was two months later and Tamara was halfway through the special topics course on quantum electrodynamics taught by Emma and two other physics professors. She had already mastered classical electrodynamics; that was two years earlier. Her ECE courses were progressing nicely too and they gave her access to some engineering fabrication shops in the Engineering School. And through Emma, she would also have access to the shops at the APL in Laurel.

Her work on a battery design had gone through a number of revisions in how she planned to approach the problem. She realized that, although her great intuitive leap had indeed produced an unexpected result, one which needed some new physics to explain, it was too great a step and resulted in chasing up a blind alley. A new approach was needed, so she went back to the fundamentals.

She began with the same polymer sheets embedded with the superconducting formula as she had used before, and tested their electron flow characteristics in all physical configurations including cylindrical formations. She made layers of sheets, similar to the “pancakes,” and tested those in various configurations and noted how their electron flow dynamics were affected. These were small steps, but all of them could eventually lead to the structure she had visualized. In each step she made, however, she noticed how potential efficiencies could be increased and pitfalls avoided. As the end of the semester approached, when she met with Emma, she told Emma about the next design change she wanted to make. It would be a slightly larger step.

“Let me review what I’m up to now,” she told Emma. “I’ve already repeated a lot of this work; the final design should look similar in structure to lithium batteries but the electron flows work completely differently. So far, everything works okay when the parts are tested independently. I made several very small model systems that also work well, so I’m ready to try putting the components together in a full-sized device.”

Emma interrupted. “Using those polymer sheets you had the APL make?”

“Yeah, the tiny ones I made in the Double-E lab worked and when I doubled their size, they worked too. I told you that.”

“Yes, I know. But it’s tricky, micro-printing SETs like that,” Emma pointed out.

“Tell me about it. I got help figuring out that part. What I have now is basically a micro-porous film of polyvinylidene difluoride—PVdF—in which I’ve embedded an integrated circuit. It’s a layered matrix of thousands of SET circuits; each of those acts as a tiny amplifier to produce an increased electron flow through the device from its source to the sink. On a small scale, I showed you that a tiny model of that design could move energy—electrons—with high efficiency.

“Then, for the energy storage, I used the ‘pancake’ idea. I set up an overlay of the PVdF film with an electrically conductive polymer doped with the superconducting formula. I had done some tests, you remember, that shows that the superconducting recipe is awesome at stably retaining electrons. In your Nobel work, you showed how the Pauli exclusion principle can be violated under very limited cases and doesn’t conflict with the quantum field theory. That’s a function of the Cooper electron pairing that your recipe achieves, allowing superconducting current to flow, but also allows a huge number of electrons to pack the atomic lattice structure. To avoid wholesale violation of Pauli’s principle, the combined potential energy of those electrons is huge. Okay, don’t frown, I’ll stop the lecture. Getting back to the design.

“There’s only a tiny amount of chemical reaction in the battery that produces energy compared to its storage abilities, likely because of the limited need for electrolyte. The PVdF layer is not only the charge separator; it’s also an electron movement booster, carrying electrons from the low-energy part of the system to the higher energy charge accumulator. So this design doesn’t need an electrolyte. I’ve bypassed that by using pressure to squeeze the layers together and can observe good charge movement. It looks like this design can be scaled—much more than the accumulator I made that blew up. The overcharge prevention is built right into the PVdF layer. You saw the small-scale model of this design, but it was all spread out on the bench. The step I think I’m ready for is to try to package a full-sized version of it. The size of an AA battery, to start.”

“Tamara, you’ve done a fantastic job already,” Emma told her. “The way you solved the original problem—the Cambridge group missed out on the idea of backtracking, as I told you. You were right—that was a blind alley and full marks to you that you could see that. Where do you anticipate taking your design further? I know that you won’t stop here.”

“What I visualize, since this thing isn’t a ‘battery’ in the true sense of the word, is to go back to the accumulator idea. A device to store energy, not make it. There’s plenty of free energy around; we saw that from that original accumulator’s explosion. I’m thinking that I can incorporate a receiver circuit into the new accumulator device similar to the circuit which powers RFID chips and connect it to an antenna which can be printed onto the outside label of the ‘battery.’ Doing that would allow the thing to recharge from environmental sources such as radio waves and the pervasive electric fields created by all of the wires that carry electricity, from power transmission lines to house electrical wiring.

“Going further, the device which the accumulator powers could itself include a circuit which allows its wiring to function as an additional antenna, allowing the device to be able to recharge the accumulator when it’s not in use. So unless the accumulator got discharged very quickly, it could last a long time before needing regular recharging.”

“Tamara, what you’ve accomplished goes way beyond a master’s research project,” Emma told her. “We need to plan what comes next, and get the Cambridge group involved too.”

Tamara realized that her mother’s interpretation of the lwas’ advice was amazingly accurate. “Great steps come with small changes. Big changes come slowly,” was the message that Tamara had gotten. Her mother had reworded that message into personal terms: proceed carefully in your work, and “When you listen to the lwa, you’re also listening to your own intuition.”

Tamara’s invention would revolutionize batteries, as well as energy storage. It might also pave the way for improving current methods of wireless power transmission over a distance.

One month later: late May

Summer vacation was here again and Tamara was taking some time off from writing up her master’s thesis work. Her research on the latest accumulator design had spawned two journal papers; the second coming when she was able to scale up the battery capacity and voltage delivered by connecting several cells in series and parallel configurations, while demonstrating that the device delivered an equal amount of energy from every connected cell when the battery was under load. Lithium-ion batteries could not do that.

This was only one of the many advantages her design had over the standard batteries: the use of superconducting components made the intra-cell and inter-cell resistances nonexistent. That allowed each cell to contribute exactly the same amount of energy when a load was connected, improving performance and minimizing cell degradation. Also, since electrochemical reactions played a minimal part of the battery’s operation, electrode and electrolyte degradation would not occur. The battery even seemed to be tolerant of a wide range of operating temperatures and showed no noticeable drop-off in power delivery until a temperature of 52 degrees Celsius (126 Fahrenheit) was exceeded. As opposed to lithium-ion batteries, temperature gradients over a fairly large range in the accumulator did not affect its individual cell outputs. However, improving its high-temperature operation was an area where more research was needed.

Preprints of her and Emma’s papers were gaining worldwide notice. Two of the engineers from her Cambridge battery group were now working at the APL on tweaking the design to try to achieve more efficiency and reduce production costs, while a division of the Cambridge group began work on scaling the device’s design to meet manufacturing standards.

Little Haiti, Miami, late May

Tamara had been in touch with Linda and Jerome during the past year. Linda wasn’t dating Carlos any more and Jerome was now seriously dating a girl he had met in Gainesville and would be staying there this summer. Tamara met with Linda several times, mostly to shop and gossip a little, but the two girls found that since being out of high school, they had little in common. So Tamara gave up on her resolution not to work on her vacation and spent a large part of her time during those two weeks writing her master’s thesis—it was mainly adapting her journal articles into a thesis form.

Since her thesis subject was mainly about electron transport over differential fields in mesoscopic systems, she intended that the degree would be in physics. She had several ideas for engineering papers on the same topics, mainly the methods for building the structures and selecting the proper materials which would allow for such electron transport. She’d speak to Dr McIntyre about that when she got back to Hopkins.

Another thing she’d get to do at Hopkins: Emma had given her the go-ahead to begin an independent project, working on her beloved MRI applications. Her work on the battery-accumulator project hadn’t kept her from exploring a number of techniques and circuit devices which she could put to use in developing better detector sensitivity. She had also checked on current and past patents in that area and found that there were several new ones that had picked up on her multiple-source design. She’d met with her patent attorney early during her first week home in Miami to discuss those inventors’ possible infringements.

Tamara also thought about her living arrangements during her JHU years. She had no problem with the school’s two-year on-campus residency policy. Her only time having a roommate was during her first semester. No one had been assigned to her room in the following spring. For her second year, she had moved to an efficiency apartment in a dorm building across the street from the university campus itself. Now, as a senior, she had to move to a non-university accommodation and she found that there were a number of good choices available; she found a single-bedroom apartment in a close-by building that the lodging part of her scholarship would cover—not that she needed it. Her licensing income could have handled those costs easily.

Tamara’s social life revolved around a small group, mostly the Clarke Scholars, since they were all very high achievers, preferred good conversation to parties, and tended to be introverted—they all inclined to be loners. Tamara’s closest female friend at Hopkins, Jill, had just graduated and was off to MIT for graduate work. Terence Dryer was still working in Emma’s lab too, and the two of them frequently helped each other out. Tamara’s knowledge of using SETs in superconducting circuits was helping him with his own project.

Only one of the other Clarke scholars in her entering class had skipped a year like Tamara; her boyfriend Peter had entered with advanced standing achieved by taking Hopkins classes while in high school. Yes, she had elevated Peter to that status now since he had reciprocated her interest in him.

Peter was a local boy; he had grown up in Davidsonville, a small town west of Annapolis. His mother was a naval officer and held a permanent teaching professorship at the U.S. Naval Academy. She had a doctorate in physics and was a condensed matter specialist. His father was a mechanical engineer at the APL, the Applied Physics Lab in Laurel that Hopkins ran; Davidsonville wasn’t far from Laurel and through his father, Peter had gotten some summer jobs there as a lab assistant. He had also taken advantage of Hopkins’ summer programs for high school kids, so when he started at Hopkins as a freshman, he already had completed most of the engineering school’s prerequisite courses.

Peter had also moved off campus like Tamara and was sharing a two-bedroom unit in the same building with his year-older sister, Barbara; her former roommate was in an international studies program and was spending her senior year abroad, so his sister needed a roommate and had persuaded Peter to take the vacant room.

When Tamara returned to campus in mid-June, she was ready for her new challenges.

Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore: mid-June

The problem was that the challenges weren’t quite ready for Tamara, so when she got back to campus, she had nothing new to work on. The battery/accumulator work had now moved from Emma’s Hopkins lab out to the APL and to Emma’s Cambridge company, and a team of attorneys were hard at work finalizing the several patent applications Tamara’s work had spawned. Emma had flown to England to review and participate in the testing of the company’s pre-manufacturing accumulator samples. She’d be back early next week.

Okay, I’ll go see Dr McIntyre, Tamara resolved. I’ll find out whether the ECE people have any publishing rules.

She called his office; he wasn’t in, so she left a message. He returned the call a few hours later.

“Hi, Tamara, what’s up? Something about a journal article?” he asked.

“Yes sir. Emma and I have two pending articles on electron transport—it’s on my battery accumulator design, the physics of how the energy is stored. But there are two possible papers I can make from my thesis. They’re more suited for an engineering publication, because they’re on design considerations, circuit printing on porous polymers, and using arrays of SETs to move electrons across potential barriers. Do I need an ECE sponsor or something to publish work like that?”

“That’s impressive work you’ve done. I don’t recall that any ECE faculty were involved with it. Were they?”

“I got some help when I was trying to print a microcircuit onto a polymer chip. I had designed and scaled it, but had a little problem with the materials I was using.”

“Was this part of your class, then? The lab?”

“No ... I learned how the equipment worked in the lab when I did the classes’ lab projects. This was a side project. Emma wanted to have her APL group do the circuit printing, but I was doing the pilot device study for my master’s project.”

“I see. So unless Emma was involved in the engineering part of your project, it seems to me that you were working independently.”

“I was,” Tamara said.

“You really don’t need our department’s permission to publish your work, but if you’d like, I’d be delighted to read your article’s final draft. I’ll also be able to steer you to the right journal to submit it to. A thought: Does Emma know you were working on a separate paper?”

“Not for this work, specifically. She did tell me, back when she convinced me to do a double major, that I could publish any of my engineering work where she wasn’t involved—being sure of the patent implications, of course.”

“Oh, of course. And you have?”

“I think about a dozen lawyers from the university’s patent office have spoken to me already. I’m good there. And I’ll be telling Emma about doing this when she returns next week.”

“Sounds good, Tamara. When do you think the draft will be ready?”

“Two papers, actually. If you don’t mind. They’re just about done, so tomorrow?”

He laughed. “Not wasting any time, are we? I’ll be in my office between 9 and 11 tomorrow. That okay?”