A team of researchers from the University of California, Irvine, have developed a nanowire-based battery that can be recharged hundreds of thousands of times. The development entails that this type of battery won't need replacing, unlike its standard counterparts.
The newly-developed battery is comprised of parts that are thousands of times thinner than a human hair, allowing for a larger surface area of electron transfer. The only downside is that nanwire batteries can be extremely fragile and may not perform well after repetitive recharging.
The findings published in the American Chemical Society's Energy Letters state that the batteries were made out of coated gold manganese dioxide nanowires and cocooned into a plexiglass-like gel. This construction allows for the batteries being fracture-resistant by keeping their properties intact.
Lead study author, Mya Le Thai, has recharged the battery 200,000 times without any capacity loss.
Senior author and chair of UCI's chemistry department, Reginald Penner, said in a statement:
"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 researchers estimate that due to the combination of the PMMA (plexiglass-like) gel electrolyte and the magnesium oxide, the nanowires maintain their flexibility and structure without cracking and thus extending their operational life.
Thai stated:
"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 lifetime and that we can make these kinds of batteries a reality."
[Based on reporting by: IFL science]
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