Battery frustration might be coming to an end

Yet another great discovery made ‘by accident’

What’s one of the biggest drawbacks to modern technology? Without doubt, the tiny life-cycle of the battery. If there were such a thing as a truly long-lasting battery it would make a huge difference to the way we live.

We could use computers without worrying if we have enough battery power, or if we’ve recharged too often that the battery might actually have come to the end of its useful life. And that’s just computers. We use batteries in all kinds of things these days, and if batteries had advanced as fast as computer technology in general all our modern technical devices would be far more useful and dependable.

Mya Le Thai with her battery discovery

Well, surprisingly (to me, anyway), there’s finally an answer to this problem. Yep, there is actually a virtually everlasting battery (or at least it’s popping its head over the horizon … it might a while before it’s widely available). And like corn flakes and the microwave oven and yes, even Viagra, the discovery that made it possible came about more or less by accident.

Ultra-long-lasting nanowire batteries were developed by a team of researchers at the University of California Irvine. The average laptop battery is rated at about 300-500 charge cycles, i.e. from fully charged to completely flat. After that, it’s headed for the recycling bin. The new battery developed at Irvine, however, endured 200,000 charge cycles over three months and was practically as good as new at the end of the experiment, which kinda indicates it’s more or less ‘unbreakable’.

That translates to the average lithium-ion laptop battery of today having an effective life of a few years, no more than that, and the new battery, in comparison, lasting about 400 years! I’d call that truly amazing.

If the developers can apply their findings to commercial uses it would indeed herald a technological revolution. And all thanks to the work of a handful of researchers at a university lab.

How was this discovered?

Mya Le Thai, a UCI doctoral candidate, was ‘playing around’ in the lab (in the words of the chair of her department) and coated a set of gold nanowires with manganese dioxide, then coated them with an electrolyte gel, which, it turns out (rather like Plexiglas) gives them a high degree of resilience and durability. Normally nanowires break down, literally, after about 8,000 charge cycles because they become so fragile. Understandable, since they’re thousands of times thinner than a human hair! Wow! But when these newly-coated nanowires were tested, they were still functional after three months, and showing no signs of deterioration.

As Thai says, “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 battery of the future?

The developers think the gel plasticises the metal oxide in the battery, lending flexibility to the nanowires, which results in a hugely extended life. The findings were recently reported in the American Chemical Society journal, Energy Letters.

The discovery could mean we’ll soon have much longer-lasting batteries in computers, home appliances, smartphones, cars and even spacecraft. Amazing what can happen when you’ve got a bit of spare time at work and you start playing around with stuff just to see what might happen! There’s a lot to be said for human curiosity!

There’s still a long way to go to reach a practical version of the discovery though. Like so many projects, it takes time to translate it to real-world uses. But we’re getting there!

Thank you, Mya Le Thai! Your discovery will benefit all of us, in time.

Credit: most of the information in this article came from Digital Trends.