What If you had a phone that never needs a battery change? What if the battery lasted as long as the day you bought it, even after years? You must have noticed – over time your phone’s battery runs out a lot quicker than you remember, this is because lithium nanowires in typical batteries grow brittle with every charge and eventually die out.
Researchers at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) have discovered a way to design a battery that can last for 400 years.
The discovery was made by Mya Le Thai, a doctoral candidate at the school and was a total accident.
While playing around in the lab, Thai coated a gold nanowire with manganese dioxide and then encased that result in an electrolyte made of a Plexiglas-like gel. Remarkably, these nanowires were able to withstand thousands of charge cycles. with a negligible 5 % loss of retention power.
A laptop’s battery can typically last for 300 to 500 cycles. So you can see how Thai’s discovery can change everything. More than anything, it could allow you save money on batteries and that also means that there will be lot less batteries to going into landfill.
“She started to cycle these gel capacitors, and that’s when we got the surprise,” said chair of the university’s chemistry department, Reginald Penner. “She said, ‘this thing has been cycling 10,000 cycles and it’s still going.’ She came back a few days later and said ‘it’s been cycling for 30,000 cycles.’ That kept going on for a month.”
Researchers say that using gold nanowires in batteries may not be the most feasible thing and suggest that nickel can be used as a substitute for mass production.
