University of California doctoral student Mya Le Thai holds a nanowire device that has the potential to enable hundreds of thousands of recharges in a lithium-ion battery. This new discovery could lead to vastly longer lifespans for batteries in laptop computers, tablet PCs, smartphones, appliances, cars and spacecraft.
Researchers have pursued using nanowires in batteries for years because the filaments, thousands of times thinner than a human hair, are highly conductive and have a large surface area for the storage and transfer of electrons.
The problem they have encountered, however, is that nanowires are also extremely fragile and don’t hold up well to repeated discharging and recharging, known as “cycling.” For example, in a typical lithium-ion battery, they expand and grow brittle, which leads to cracking.
UCI doctoral candidate Mya Le Thai solved the brittleness conundrum by coating a gold nanowire in a manganese dioxide shell and encasing the assembly in an electrolyte made of a Plexiglas-like gel. The combination, they said, is reliable and resistant to failure.
The researchers believe the gel plasticizes the metal oxide in the battery and gives it flexibility, preventing cracking.
Thai, the study’s leader, cycled the nanowire-enhanced electrode up to 200,000 times over three months without detecting any loss of battery capacity or power and without fracturing any nanowires.
“All nanowire capacitors can be extended from 2000 to 8000 cycles to more than 100,000 cycles, simply by replacing a liquid electrolyte with a… gel electrolyte,” the researchers wrote in their paper.
“The coated electrode holds its shape much better, making it a more reliable option,” Thai said in a statement. “This research proves that a nanowire-based Toshiba Satellite L750 Battery electrode can have a long lifetime and that we can make these kinds of batteries a reality.”
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