A Battery That Could Last A Lifetime

A battery that could withstand 200,000 recharges without dying, may soon be a reality!

All work and no play make Jack a dull boy. And sometimes play could lead to the invention of something as amazing as a battery that could last for a lifetime.

Wondering what we are talking about?

Researchers at University of California, Irvine, accidentally discovered that in case of lithium-ion batteries (the ones mostly used in smartphones), coating a gold nanowire in a manganese dioxide shell and then casting it in an electrolyte made of a Plexiglas-like gel could increase their tensile strength, thereby making them last for 400 times longer than some of the best-performing batteries currently available on the market!

Mya Le Thai, the study leader and doctoral candidate at University of California explains the benefit of gold coated nanowires in the following manner: ‘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 liftetime’.

Nanowires used in lithium-ion batteries are ten thousand times thinner than hair, have large surface area and are highly conductive. In most cases, batteries lose their charging capacities over time, and can’t withstand more than 7,000 recharges. After that these batteries become useless and end up in the pile of electronic waste.

But this is not the case with the battery that has been developed by the scientists at University of California. The battery with gold nanowires can be recharged hundreds of thousands of times without being replaced. What this does is that it increases the longevity of the device which in turn, would prove beneficial in all the areas where these lithium ion batteries are used. Some of these areas being: smartphones, tablets, cars, computers and even spacecraft.

This battery developed in the University of California can withstand up to 200,000 cycles! The scientists mentioned in their research paper that they tested the battery for 3 months and for 200,000 cycles and noticed no decline in capacity or power of the battery. These findings were also published in the American Chemical Society’s Energy Letters.

‘All nanowire capacitors can be extended from 2000 to 8000 cycles to more than 100,000 cycles, simply by replacing a liquid electrolyte with a… gel electrolyte’, the researchers wrote in their paper.

What if we tell you that the scientists themselves were a little taken aback by their “playful” invention? In fact, it seems that the researchers themselves were for some time unsure of the way this new technology works. Penner one of the researchers told Popular Science, ‘We started to cycle the devices, and then realised that they weren’t going to die… We don’t understand the mechanism of that yet’, Now that is the magic of science.

The only problem that emerges in this rosy scenario is the usage of Gold for coating nanowires to increase the tensile strength of the wires. Gold is obviously a precious and expensive metal which implies that if gold nanowires are used for making lithium-ion batteries in commercial products then that might end up burning a hole in your pocket. And no one wants that.

But worry not; the researchers have a solution for this problem too. The researchers believe that if the technology turns out to be popular then gold could be replaced by a more common metal such as nickel. This pretty much solves the problem for us.

Developments like these could prove a boon to the world of technology but that’s possible only when the technology doesn’t just remain limited as a research project and could be utilized as a commercial product. Who wouldn’t want their batteries to live long after all?

Originally published at Chip-Monks.