A doctoral candidate at the University of California at Irvine seems to have accidentally created a battery that will seemingly last forever. In April of this year, UCI doctoral candidate and researcher, Mya Le Thai (pictured in the photo above), created a battery of gold nanowires and an electrolyte gel which has ended up having a life span that is 400 times that of a standard lithium battery.
The standard lithium and liquid battery can go through a cycle of being recharged around 500 times. The new gold nanowire battery created by Thai has the capacity of be recharged, without any loss of power at all, over 200,000 times. This will easily power anything someone may have, including a cell phone and laptop, for the life of the object that is running on the batteries.
In standard batteries, the lithium eventually kills the battery through corrosion and the liquid used in the batteries tends to be rather unstable and combustible. Scientists have been wanting to use the gold nanowires in batteries for a long time because gold is such a tremendous conductor. The accident, it seems, related to the electrolyte gel that Thai decided to experiment with.
She coated the battery in the gel and set about recharging it. She realized that the gel enabled the battery to be recharged hundreds of thousands of times without breaking down or losing any of its original power. The gold nanowires were also coated with manganese dioxide.
Challenges still remain however as tests need to be made with the new battery in devices to see exactly how long they will last and to see what kind of overall affect they will have on computers and consumer electronics. Also, the gold nanowaires are expensive and could cause the battery companies to forgo any sort of production. Not to say that the battery companies won’t ignore the new battery because they likely will. Where will their profit margins be if everyone just needed to buy their batteries only once?
PHOTO CREDIT: University of California at Irvine