“New research by a California-based team could change the way lithium-ion batteries are charged in consumer electronics products and electric cars, leading to longer lifetimes and more useful batteries,” Martyn Williams reports for IDG News Service.
“The work, published on Sunday in the Nature Materials journal, challenges the commonly held notion that slowly charging a battery helps prolong its life and that it’s damaging to a battery if a large amount of energy is withdrawn in a short time,” Williams reports. “‘We’ve always thought of a battery as a [single] device, but inside an iPhone battery there are a few trillion particles,’ said William Chueh, a senior author of the paper and researcher at the Stanford Institute for Materials and Energy Sciences, in an interview.”
“Armed with the new knowledge, the researchers are proposing several ways to charge batteries more uniformly, a change that could take the average life of a lithium-ion battery from a couple of years to around 10 years,” Williams reports. “More uniform charging, whether fast or slow, causes less localized heating that can degrade the battery.”
Read more in the full article here.