A Scientist Just Accidentally Developed A Battery That Could Last A Lifetime

Poor battery life is the number one issue when it comes to smartphones and laptops. As a wireless society, having to secure ourselves to power up our gadgets seems more and more a nuisance. Furthermore, while scientists are looking into wireless charging, we would have to worry less if batteries were better.

Now, a brand-new technology promises just that. Researchers from the University of Golden State, Irvine, have invented a nanowire-based battery that can be recharged hundreds of thousands of times, a substantial leap towards a battery that does not require replacing.

Nanowires possess several optimal characteristics for electrical storage and also transmission. They are highly conductive as well as thousands of times thinner than a human hair, which means they can be arranged to offer an enormous surface area for electron transfer. Unfortunately, nanowires are usually very delicate and do not do well after repeated charging and discharging.

The researchers, whose findings are released in the American Chemical Society’s Power Letters, have covered gold nanowires in manganese dioxide and also cocooned them in a Plexiglas-like gel. This combination maintains all the nanowires’ properties intact and makes them resistant to fractures.

Mya Le Thai, the lead research study author, has charged and discharged the battery up to 200,000 times without breaking the nanowires and without losing capacity.

“Mya was playing around, and she covered this whole thing with a very thin gel layer and also started to cycle it,” said senior author Reginald Penner, chair of UCI’s chemistry department, in a statement. “She discovered that simply by utilizing this gel, she can cycle it hundreds of thousands of times without losing any capability.”

“That was crazy,” he included, “because these things usually die in dramatic style after 5,000 or 6,000 or 7,000 cycles at most.”

The researchers believe that the combination of the PMMA (plexiglass-like) gel electrolyte and the magnesium oxide gives flexibility and structure to the nanowires, avoiding fracturing and thus prolonging their operational life.

“The coated electrode holds its form much better, making it a more reliable option,” Thai said. “This study proves that a nanowire-based battery electrode could have a long lifetime and that we can make these types of batteries a reality.”

Read the original article on IFL Science.