Scientists at the University of California, Irvine, did a mistake and the result was amazing. They managed to invent a nanowire-based battery which is supposed to last 400 times longer than the best-performing batteries available commercially.
Batteries, these days, are made of lithium and they hold electric charges. However, there is a major drawback so far as lithium-ion batteries are concerned. With every charging-discharging cycle, the lithium corrodes a bit and degrades. This makes it brittle and cracks starts appearing which makes the battery useless after a few years.
Steve Zylius/UCI
Effort was on for a long time to replace the lithium with nanowires. Nanowires are interesting material which is thousands of times thinner than human hair. They are super conductive and have a vast surface area for movement and storage of electrons. Only problem here is; nanowires are very fragile and so, they don’t hold up well in continuous charging and discharging scenario.
UCI researchers have accidentally created a remedy by coating gold nanowires with a manganese dioxide shell. They suspended it in an electrolyte Plexiglas-like gel. This new arrangement keeps the nanowires intact and don’t let them disintegrate easily.
The study leader, Mya Le Thai, tested the battery by subjecting it through charging-discharging cycles for nearly 200,000 times over a period of three months. The battery did surprisingly well without any failure or nanowire degradation!
“Mya was playing around, and she coated this whole thing with a very thin gel layer and started to cycle it,” informed Reginald Penner who is a senior author of the study. He further added; “She discovered that just by using this gel, she could cycle it hundreds of thousands of times without losing any capacity.”
The astonishing part is that the scientists still aren’t sure about the working principles of this new technology. “We started to cycle the devices, and then realised that they weren’t going to die,” PennertoldPopular Science. “We don’t understand the mechanism of that yet.”
But, hold your breath, the batteries are made of gold nanowire and so, they will be very expensive to implement commercially. To overcome this, scientists are trying to replace gold with nickel.
Mya Le Thai is naturally delighted over the new discovery. She said, “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.”
In the meantime, we will keep our finger crossed so that a commercially viable nanowire battery is discovered soon which will last forever!
The paper was published on April 25,2016 in theAmerican Chemical Society’s Energy Letters.
Author: Technology Vista
