News JVTech Scientists have created a battery capable of operating a smartphone for 400 years
Electronic devices that operate using a battery always end up being victims of a concern for autonomy. A researcher from the University of California may well have found an effective solution to this problem.
Despite great efforts made in recent years, that’s a fact : the battery of a smartphone, a tablet, a joystick or a wireless headset inexorably ends up seeing its effectiveness decline over the years. A smartphone with 24 hours of battery life no longer holds a charge for more than 16 hours after a while, and that’s infuriating, because everything else works fine. This is an issue that is all the more worrying these days, with the development of electric vehicles.
A typical Lithium-ion battery typically lasts a few hundred charge cycles before it starts to see its performance drop.. It remains to find a more sustainable alternative. This is what Mya Le Thai did when she was a doctoral student at the University of California at Irvine in 2016. At the time, the student made a chance discovery which had not been much talked about, but it is back on the front of the stage at the start of the year.
A battery with a theoretical life of 400 years
Mya Le Thai was doing her thesis on nanobatteries. One day, she decided to try a new experience : she coated a whole set of gold nanowires with manganese dioxide. She then added an electrolyte gel similar to Plexiglas. The main objective of the process was to make nanowires less brittle, which is a problem for their use. Since they are very thin and highly conductive, this makes them ideal candidates for battery design. Without any particular treatment, the nanowires present in a battery display a lifetime of between 5000 and 7000 cycles.
This experiment conducted by the doctoral student and her colleagues enabled them to develop a prototype battery capable of withstanding 200,000 recharge cycles over a test period spread over three months. And at the end of this period, it turns out that the prototype only displayed no signs of nanowire fracturingand no loss of power.
A solution for longer lasting batteries?
If this discovery is talked about today, it is above all becauseit revives the hope of seeing more efficient and more durable high-tech devices over time. Producing batteries is extremely energy-intensive and requires rare and polluting components and materials. Fact, succeeding in extending the life of such an element would very clearly be an asset for the planet. In addition, the use of battery-powered devices should continue and even develop in the future, with the massive arrival of electric cars on the market. It is obvious that researchers have a card to play with this type of discovery.
Ultimately, we do not know if Mya Le Thai continues to work on this technology discovered by chance, but it suggests that research is underway to develop the battery of tomorrow.
