RESEARCHERS AT the University of California at Irvine (UCI) have accidentally - yes, accidentally - discovered a nano-wire-based technology that could lead to batteries that can be charged hundreds of thousands of times.
Mya Le Thai, a PhD candidate at the university, explained in a paper published this week that she and her colleagues used nano-wires, a material that is several thousand times thinner than a human hair, extremely conductive and has a surface area large enough to support the storage and transfer of electrons.
Nano-wires are extremely fragile and don't usually hold up well to repeated discharging and recharging, or cycling. They expand and grow brittle in a typical lithium-ion battery, but Le Thai’s team fixed this by coating a gold nano-wire in a manganese dioxide shell and then placing it in a Plexiglas-like gel to improve its reliability. All by accident.
The breakthrough could lead to laptop, smartphone and tablet batteries that last forever.
Reginald Penner, chairman of UCI's chemistry department, said: "Mya was playing around and she coated this whole thing with a very thin gel layer and started to cycle it.
"She discovered that just by using this gel she could cycle it hundreds of thousands of times without losing any capacity. That was crazy, because these things typically die in dramatic fashion after 5,000 or 6,000 or 7,000 cycles at most."
The battery-like structure was tested more than 200,000 times over a three-month span, and the researchers reported no loss of capacity or power.
"The coated electrode holds its shape much better, making it a more reliable option," Thai said. "This research proves that a nano wire-based battery electrode can have a long lifetime and that we can make these kinds of batteries a reality."
The breakthrough also paves the way for commercial batteries that could last a lifetime in appliances, cars and spacecraft.
British fuel-cell maker Intelligent Energy Holdings announced earlier this year that it is working on a smartphone battery that will need to be charged only once a week.
Source: The Inquirer
My thoughts exactly. Some quality journalism there --- Open the article with over-the-top heavy emphasis on "accidentally" (about a ridiculously specific set of materials and circumstances), and then never bother to explain why/how it was accidental.
