Student accidentally makes ground-breaking discovery of batteries that could last 400 years

Science and technology hold tremendous potential in creating effortless and smart lifestyles. Scientists, researchers, and even students are outdoing themselves with endless discoveries and inventions. While every project requires hard work and reasoning, some have a good dose of fun and magic too. UCI doctoral candidate Mya Le Thai from the University of California, Irvine, stumbled upon a stunning innovation that could be an economic and eco-friendly live-saver, per UCI News. You read that right—Thai created a mind-boggling product that could be a boon to science and technology, as well as the planet, by accident.

A team of researchers led by Reginald Penner, chair of the chemistry department at the university, were testing nanowires. Nanowires are tiny conductive wires that show great promise for use in batteries, per Smithsonian Magazine. However, one problem with nanowires is that they are brittle and don’t have a long shelf life. After a certain number of charging cycles, they are known to break or crack, making them temporarily durable. The researchers at UCI were exploring the potential ways of improvising when they came up with a breakthrough. The team came to the remarkable discovery that encasing a gold nanowire in a manganese dioxide shell and providing a specific type of covering can greatly benefit durability. This covering would be an electrolyte made of a Plexiglas-like gel.

Of course, nothing concrete can be laid out without testing and experimenting. Penner revealed that the ground-breaking discovery came from a student’s curiosity. Thai was intrigued to study more and experiment with the nanowires. “Mya was playing around, and she coated this whole thing with a very thin gel layer and started to cycle it,” Penner said. As an astonishing result, the student realized that this coating ingeniously helps the battery charge and work continuously “hundreds of thousands of times.” While the normal capacity of batteries is up to 7000 cycles at most, Thai was able to cycle her newly improved product up to 200,000 times in 3 months, with no damage to the nanowires. 

Sharing a theory as to why this may have worked out, researchers pointed out that the coating plasticizes the metal, making it more flexible to move and reducing the damage significantly. “The coated electrode holds its shape much better, making it a more reliable option. This research proves that a nanowire-based battery electrode can have a long lifetime and that we can make these kinds of batteries a reality,” Thai remarked. The student continues to work on the project trying to fix loopholes and find answers to other questions. 

The innovation, having completed 200,000 cycles successfully over 3 months, is very promising. It probes the potential to provide batteries lasting up to 400 years for laptops and other devices, per MI Tech News. This reduces the dump in landfills, making it a plus point for the planet too. “The big picture is that there may be a very simple way to stabilize nanowires of the type that we studied. If this turns out to be generally true, it would be a great advance for the community,” Penner noted.