Development of nuclear microbattery prototype based on Schottky barrier diamond diodes

• DOI: 10.1002/pssa.201532214
• Publication Date: 2015-06-05T12:38:48Z
• Authors: Vitaly Bormashov; Sergey Troschiev; Alexander Volkov; Sergey Tarelkin; Eugeniy Korostylev; Anton Golovanov; Mikhail Kuznetsov; Dmitry Teteruk; Nikolay Kornilov; Sergey Terentiev; Sergey Buga; Vladimir Blank
• Keywords: 0103 physical sciences; 02 engineering and technology; 0210 nano-technology; 01 natural sciences; 7. Clean energy

We designed, fabricated, and tested for the first time a prototype of nuclear micropower battery with an overall active area about 15 cm2consisted in 130 single cells based on Schottky barrier diamond diodes. Diodes selection for the battery assembly was performed on the basis ofI–Vcurves measurements at electron beam irradiation in SEM. A typical energy conversion efficiency of each cell was about 4–6%. To characterize a battery prototype performance, we carried out photovoltaic measurements using different radioisotopes. Under irradiation by63Ni source with activity of 5 mCi cm−2, the output power density of 3 nW cm−2was obtained. Due to large energy loss of the emitted β particles in source itself, the total battery efficiency was only 0.6%. However, with the long‐lived63Ni isotope, this already gives the battery specific energy of about 120 W · hr/kg, comparable with the commercial chemical cells. During experiments with high activity90Sr–90Y source, no degradation was observed after 1,400 h of the radiation exposure. The maximum output power density of 2.4 µW cm−2was achieved using238Pu α source. The results display that synthetic diamond is a highly promising material for nuclear microbattery fabrication. A strategy to further cell optimization is also discussed.