Nanotechnology Extending Battery Life

Scientists keep them going and going and going.

I’ll be you’ve been tempted to toss your smart phone or laptop across the room in frustration because the battery weakened over time and needed recharging more and more frequently. What good are all these electronic gadgets if the batteries peter out too soon?

Those days may soon be over. Researchers at the University of California, Irvine recently invented a battery made of nano material. That innovation allows for recharging hundreds of thousands of times, which would eliminate the most annoying aspect of batteries.

Current nano-based batteries have highly conductive nanowires with a large surface area for storing and transferring electrons. However, they’re extremely brittle and crack with repeated recharging. This problem was solved by encasing a manganese dioxide-coated gold nanowire an electrolyte made of a gel.

Scientists tested the electrode hundreds of thousands of times during a three-month period and and detected no loss of capacity or damaged nanowires. Batteries typically die after 5,000 to 7,000 cycles.

It’s not clear when such batteries will be available for commercial products. The full study is available online in the American Chemical Society’s Energy Letters.

Sources:

• Chris Smith. “Someone found a way to recharge batteries hundreds of thousands of times.” bgr.com. 21 April, 2016.
• “Chemists create battery technology with off-the-charts charging capacity.” phys.org. 20, April, 2016.