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Researchers just built a battery that is good for over 200,000 charge cycles

By Koh Wanzi - on 30 Apr 2016, 10:55am

Researchers just built a battery that is good for over 200,000 charge cycles

Note: This article was first published on 25th April 2016.

Image Source: UC Irvine

Most smartphone and device batteries today are good for only hundreds of charge cycles, which means that you’ll probably notice decreased battery life after you’ve used it for over a year. However, thanks to a happy accident, researchers at UC Irvine may just have created a battery that can last for over 200,000 charge cycles – around 400 times longer than current lithium batteries.

The new battery was able to cycle through 200,000 recharges without significant corrosion or decline. In fact, the battery lost only about five percent of its capacity.

But in a slightly humorous turn, the researchers don’t entirely know how this works. They were originally looking to make a solid-state battery – one that uses an electrolyte gel instead of liquid state lithium to help hold the charge. One downside of these liquid batteries is that they are extremely combustible and sensitive to temperature, which prompted the team to seek a better alternative.

Liquid is used partly because its conductivity enables flexible and partial charging and discharging, and past efforts to find a highly conductive electrolyte gel that shares these properties have proven challenging.

While experimenting with different materials, the researchers ended up using gold nanowire coated in manganese oxide, which was then protected by a layer of electrolyte gel.

Nanowires have long been held out as the ideal battery material because their high surface area can hold a lot of electric charge, but the wire eventually corrodes in traditional lithium environments.

This time, the manganese oxide ended up fusing with the gel to form a protective sheath around the wire, which allowed the battery to last through hundreds of thousands of cycles.

Nevertheless, there’s still quite a long way to go before we will see similar batteries appear in consumer devices. And even though only tiny amounts of gold were used here, it would still make the batteries rather expensive to produce. But if the technology catches on, the researchers say that a cheaper and more common metal like nickel could be a viable alternative for mass production.

Source: Popular Science via Engadget

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