New Battery Tech Could Change Everything

Jstas

So this researcher made this battery by accident.

Here's the article: https://www.iflscience.com/new-battery-can-be-recharged-hundreds-thousands-times-35244

What she did was she took a gold nanowire coated in manganese dioxide (that stuff is in pretty much every dry cell battery) which is SUPER fragile and was playing with charging and discharging it. But it kept breaking after a few charging cycles.

So she coated the nanowire in a PMMA gel which is an electrolytic gel. Then she started the charging and discharging cycle again.

At this point, she's reached over 200K charge cycles with no damage to the cells and no loss of capacity.

That's INSANE! For comparison, your average lithium based cellphone or laptop battery can go through 5,000-7,000 cycles at most before catastrophic failure and really only gets to about 3,000-3,500 before you see significant degradation in performance. So a 200,000 charge cycle means you go from about 9.5 years of charge cycles before degradation to about 547 years with no degradation. That means batteries turn into family heirlooms.

Additionally, because the cell uses nanowire tech, the cell density can be extremely high in a fairly small, lightweight package.

I haven't seen what the voltage capacity or amperage support measurements are but even if it's just 1/20th of a volt, you can fit enough cells in the same volume of a human hair to make one volt. That means the human head has as much area as 90,000 to 150,000 volts given this technology. Granted that's not exactly how it works or scales and I need more info on the cell capacity to be able to do the math right but, if you have 90,000-150,000 hairs on your head then you can see how much energy can be stored in the same area.

This has the potential to destroy all other battery tech and remove the need for rare earth metals and minerals. Especially if they can get a different substrate other than gold, like graphene to make the rods out of and stabilize them.

Only problem is, we'll still need evil oil because PMMA is Poly(methyl methacrylate) which is also known as Acrylic Glass or Plexiglas and it's made from oil based products.

invalid

I didn't have time to read the article, but how do they charge and discharge it 200,000 times.

Jstas

If the cell size is tiny with a fraction of a volt and a fraction of a mAh then they can charge and discharge it as fast as a capacitor. So if it takes, say, 30 seconds to run a charge and discharge cycle, that's 2 cycles per minute.

So to get to 200K cycles, that's 100,000 minutes which is about 1667 hours which is about 69-70 days. So an automated test bed running for about 2 months and 1 week will hit that cycle count.

polrbehr

If it was me, I'd change my name and move. Like yesterday. There's a speeding crosstown bus with her name on it, guaranteed.