Battery breakthrough could lead to longer smartphone battery life

As much as we have all come to depend upon our laptops, smartphones and tablets, and as often as we have to charge them, the harsh reality is one day their batteries will fail and have to be replaced – but what if someone invented a battery that could essentially last forever?

Researchers at the University of California, Irvine are currently working on just such a battery: a nanowire-based technology which could be recharged hundreds of thousands of times, drastically increasing the lifespan for the commercial batteries that power computers and mobile devices.

In a paper published Wednesday in the journal Energy Letters, lead author Mya Le Thai, a Ph. D. candidate at the university, and her colleagues explained how they manage to utilize nanowires, a material that is several thousand times thinner than a hair, is extremely conductive and which has a surface area large enough to support the storage and transfer of electrons.

Typically, they are also fragile and tend to grow brittle and crack after repeated charging cycles, which has hampered their use in battery technology. However, Le Thai’s team was able to solve this issue by coating a gold nanowire with a manganese dioxide shell, then placing the assembly in an Plexiglas-like gel to improve its reliability and make it less resistant to failure.

Technology was tested 200,000 times over a three month span

The battery-like structure as tested more than 200,000 times over a three-month span, and the study authors reported no loss of capacity or power. Furthermore, none of the nanowires were damaged, and they believe that the gel plasticized the metal oxide, improving its flexibility.

“Mya was playing around, and she coated this whole thing with a very thin gel layer and started to cycle it,” senior author Reginald Penner, the chair of the UCI chemistry department, explained earlier this week in a press release. “She discovered that just by using this gel, she could cycle it hundreds of thousands of times without losing any capacity.”

Typically, he added, these batteries cease functioning after between 5,000 and 7,000 cycles. So why did this one work so much better? Thai explained that “the coated electrode holds its shape much better, making it a more reliable option. This research proves that a nanowire-based battery electrode can have a long lifetime and that we can make these kinds of batteries a reality.”

The work was conducted in cooperation with the Nanostructures for Electrical Energy Storage Energy Frontier Research Center at the University of Maryland, and may lead to better battery life not just for smartphones, tablets and computers, but for appliances, automotive vehicles and spacecraft as well, according to the researchers.

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Image credit: Thinkstock

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