Researches developed battery with 10x longer charge
A great news for all owners of mobile phones which batteries become empty in few hours appared today: Stanford researchers have found a way to use silicon nanowires to reinvent the rechargeable lithium-ion batteries that power laptops, iPods, video cameras, cell phones, and countless other devices. The new version, developed through research led by Yi Cui, assistant professor of materials science and engineering, produces 10 times the amount of electricity of existing lithium-ion, known as Li-ion, batteries. A laptop that now runs on battery for two hours could operate for 20 hours, a boon to ocean-hopping business travelers. “It’s not a small improvement,” Cui said. “It’s a revolutionary development.” The greatly expanded storage capacity could make Li-ion batteries attractive to electric car manufacturers. Cui suggested that they could also be used in homes or offices to store electricity generated by rooftop solar panels. “Given the mature infrastructure behind silicon, this new technology can be pushed to real life quickly,” Cui said. The electrical storage capacity of a Li-ion battery is limited by how much lithium can be held in the battery’s anode, which is typically made of carbon. Silicon has a much higher capacity than carbon, but also has a drawback.
Silicon placed in a battery swells as it absorbs positively charged lithium atoms during charging, then shrinks during use (i.e., when playing your iPod) as the lithium is drawn out of the silicon. This expand/shrink cycle typically causes the silicon (often in the form of particles or a thin film) to pulverize, degrading the performance of the battery. Cui’s battery gets around this problem with nanotechnology. The lithium is stored in a forest of tiny silicon nanowires, each with a diameter one-thousandth the thickness of a sheet of paper. The nanowires inflate four times their normal size as they soak up lithium. But, unlike other silicon shapes, they do not fracture. Research on silicon in batteries began three decades ago. Candace Chan, a graduate student of Cui, explained: “The people kind of gave up on it because the capacity wasn’t high enough and the cycle life wasn’t good enough. And it was just because of the shape they were using. It was just too big, and they couldn’t undergo the volume changes.” This sounds really promising…
Source: Sciencedaily
Comments(21)
Sweet.. here’s one I’d really like to see working in practice. My laptop lasts like 2 hrs… 20 would be nice.
Hmmm sex toys…..
nice info, I’ll be expecting this next get techology to be the best technology for cordless drills. my makita li-ion already kicks ass but with this – it’d be godly.
I’ve really been waiting for this for a very long time. Now I’ll actually become interested in getting a laptop and/or a video iPod.
I think that when this hits general use it’ll create a massive sure in gagdet usage.
It souds great. But you know how greedy corporations are they will prob try to block this from getting to us or start by only giving us double the power, instead of all at once. Do you know how much money they would lose? It would be 10 times as long before they would get repeat business. I just hope I’m wrong though.
Wonderful!
This absolutely is a huge step!
Thanks for the news
V
PS: I like the warning message that you put on the comments.
does this mean i can play haIo 3 longer?
@8, but they dont ban, less comments = less income for this site
so stop kissing their tiny balls.
What was it last year, nano scaffolding gives 20 times performance?, year before that methanol fuel cells for latops, year before that super efficient solar panels.
Same crap different year.
Very old news, the Stanford team made an announcement about this in July.
Any “improvement” in batterys will not be seen to the general public for years as they will be “battle tested” by other demanding things just look how long other types were used else where before we seen them put into AA/AAA/C/D/etc forms
This will be commercially available in 202_, if _________, and if ________, and only if__________.
#12, I fully agree with you. Scientist have the tendency to exaggerate the real implications of their research, which basically means we can expect this thing to hit the stores around 2010 with a real capacity improvement of 5 tops.
great news
cant wait for this tech for my 24V DC NiCd S.C.R.T. (Self Contained Rescue Tool)
ps: love msg in comment box and have a noice cristmass and happy nnew year
Usually, the info they show is a lab test result.
Lab test < Real day to day test
So, for 20hrs of battery life, I bet we can only get
half of it.
if its a new technology, release is late, prices
are expensive…
this is definitely something good, my current phone lasts 4/5 days but if i play some game for 15 minutes it lasts just 1 or 2
sweet, more bang for ya buk now eh
as the post says the possibilities for the use of this tech is endless, now if they could only quadruple this tech then im sure car manufacturers would be interested but atm theyd sure just say pissoff tbh
quadruple for cars? you can already have cars that run longer on their batteries than they would with a full tank of gas, what more do you need? 10 times that and you can drive your car for 10 days without recharging.. There’s been viable electric cars out for 15 years but big oil / GM keeps them back. Just google “Gen I EV1″ and the recall of it in 2000, plus the Gen 2 version recall. Then you’ll understand why there’s no viable electric cars out for the public.
Hybrids/EVs work just as fine as gasoline cars, but to keep the oil-based economy going you need to have something drinking all that oil. Someone has clearly been watching too much Mad Max…
unfortunately things in the lithium world move at snails pace.. we use cutting edge lithium polymers in our r/c models, and 2 years ago big names were promising batteries that would charge 5 times as quick, with 3 times as much capacity.
Here we are now, with almost the same batteries as back then, the only advance being higher discharge rates and lower temperatures.
These claims are usually hugely overrated and only published to get people (suckers) to buy company stock to fund research.
Development of new technology these days isn’t as cheap as it used to be!