This New Technology Could Help Batteries 40 Times Longer Than Before Said Scientist.
Imagine a battery that can be recharged hundreds of thousands of times without ever corroding. A team of researchers at the University of California, Irvine, recently has created just that utilizing a nanowire-based battery material.
A new technology of battery-making may possibly allow these energy sources to last 400 times longer than usual, a new study has found.
The technology makes use of a nanowire-based material that can be recharged for thousands of times, flagging the way for the option that battery replacement may not be necessary anymore.
This doesn’t mean that you will soon see such batteries on store shelves. The new research was planned to test nanowires and not a practical battery, research co-author Dr. Reginald Penner, the chemistry professor at the university, told The Huffington Post on Friday.
The new battery technology, though, could edge us closer to possibly developing longer durable profitable batteries for smartphones, computers, cars and spacecraft in the future.
“Scientists are interested in nanowires because they allow high power to be obtained, without reducing the total amount of energy that is stored,” Penner said
“But nanowires are fragile,” he added. “Any corrosion or dissolution of the nanowire material leads very quickly to breakage of the nanowire, and a loss of its capacity — which is bad. Our research is important because it demonstrates that a very simple modification to a battery or capacitor may allow nanowire electrode materials to last a lot longer, up to 40 times longer in our studies.”
Nanowires are very tiny conductors that have long been a subject of battery-making production. This is because of their high conductivity, very thin structure and big surface area for the transmission and storage of electrons.
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| Image by STEVE ZYLIUS / UCI |
The main interruptions to nanowire-based batteries are the issues of inability and fragility to tolerate periodic recharging, cycling and discharging. When these nanowires are placed in ordinary lithium-ion batteries, they spread and become fragile, resulting in cracks.
For the research, published in the journal Energy Letters on Wednesday, gold nanowires were coated with a manganese dioxide shell and covered in an electrolyte made of a Plexiglas-like gel. The nanowires are thousands of times thinner than a human hair.
The researchers tested the power of the electrode up to 200,000 times over three months. They were shocked to discover that, in spite of all of the tests, there was no loss of capacity or power and the nanowires didn’t fracture.
“We were not attempting to extend the cycle life of these electrodes — we just were trying to prepare a solid state version of them by substituting a gel electrolyte for the liquid electrolyte,” Penner said.
“The coated electrode holds its shape much better, making it a more reliable option,” said research lead author Mya Le Thai, a UCI doctoral candidate, in a statement. “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.”