Researchers Accidentally Invent A Battery that Lasts Forever
Accidents’
happening in labs is not a good thing. But, what if that accident
yields an unexpected result leading researchers to a system that could
make batteries last up to 400 times longer than the best-performing
batteries today?
Researchers from the University of California,
Irvine have accidentally made a battery that can last up to 200,000
cycles of recharging and can last up to 400 times longer. This discovery
could bring us closer to batteries that can be charged thousands of
times, without the need for any replacement.
The original idea of the research was to create a solid-state battery
by replacing the common liquid in the lithium batteries with a much
thicker electrolyte gel, according to their study published in the
journal ACS Energy Letters. They also substituted the lithium in the
batteries with gold nanowires for electric storage.
“We
started to cycle the devices, and then realized that they weren’t going
to die,” said Reginald Penner, a lead author of the paper. “We don’t
understand the mechanism of that yet.”
The Irvine battery
technology uses a gold nanowire, no thicker than a bacterium, coated in
manganese oxide and then protected by a layer of electrolyte gel. The
gel interacts with the metal oxide coating to avoid corrosion. The
longer the wire, the more surface area, and the more charge it can hold.
“[The
gel] does more than just hold the wire together. It actually seems to
make the metal oxide softer and more fracture-resistant. It increases
the fracture toughness of this metal oxide that is doing the charge
storage,” Penner said.
The UCI nanobattery was tried out in test
conditions over a three month period, producing a “94-96% average
Coulombic efficiency,” according to the researchers. No loss of capacity
or power and fracturing of any nanowires was recorded by the test.
UCI
doctoral candidate Mya Le Thai was the one who made the accidental
invention a reality when she coated a set of gold nanowires in manganese
dioxide, then applied a, “Plexiglas-like,” electrolyte gel.
These
nanowires usually degrade after limited use, as their fragility causes
them to crack during charge and discharge loads. However, when the
researchers at UCI tested Mya’s versions, they found they were almost
entirely intact and ready for further use.
“Mya was playing
around, and she coated this whole thing with a very thin gel layer and
started to cycle it,” said Penner. “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,” he said.
The
researchers suspect that the gel caused the metal oxide in the battery
to plasticize, providing its nanowires new-found flexibility and
longevity to the battery.
“The coated electrode holds its shape
much better, making it a more reliable option,” Thai 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.”
If
new found technology is applied to present consumer electronics, it can
create a battery that can last 400 times longer than the common lithium
batteries. But, the UCI nano battery is still in its development stage,
and it will still be a long time before it is made commercially
available. However, once it is available, it could make a major
difference to computers, smartphones, and appliances in the market in
terms of providing power to the devices.
The study was conducted
in coordination with the Nanostructures for Electrical Energy Storage
Energy Frontier Research Center at the University of Maryland, with
funding from the Basic Energy Sciences division of the U.S. Department
of Energy.
