“Researchers at the University of California Irvine (UCI) may have discovered a way to drastically increase the life of modern day batteries,” Wiehahn Diederichs reports for Gearburn. “And the best part is that they stumbled upon this solution by accident.”
“To be more specific, the discovery was made by fifth-year PhD student, Mya Le Thai. Mya was working on an electrolyte gel that was to substitute the electrolyte liquid currently found in batteries in an attempt to make it more affordable,” Diederichs reports. “But in a coincidental twist of fate (thank you battery gods), her solution also happened to significantly extend the lifespan of a battery.”
“Typically, a Lithium Ion battery can go through between 5000 and 7000 recharge cycles before it dies and will also gradually lose its energy storage capacity over time,” Diederichs reports. “When researchers applied Thai’s plexiglass-like gel to gold nanowires in a manganese dioxiode shell, it increased that number to over 200,000 and the battery didn’t lose any of its power or storage capacity over a period of three months.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Hopefully, further studies proven valuable and the technology can progress as quickly as possible out of the lab and into real-life use. Batteries are the killer bottleneck of mobile technology.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Rainy Day” for the heads up.]