SCIENTIST CREATES ‘EVERLASTING’ BATTERY BY ACCIDENT

Mya Le Thai, who in 2016 was a Ph.D candidate at the University of California at Irvine, created a nanowire alternative to lithium-ion battery completely by accident. Nanowires are tiny conductive wires less than 100 nanometers in diameter with good properties as batteries, Tibi Puiu wrote for ZME Science.

But their tiny size makes them extremely fragile, which causes them to fray and crack easily after a number of charging cycles. One fateful day, Le Thai switched the liquid electrolyte that bathed the nanowire assembly with a gel capacitor. During subsequent tests, she later found, much to her surprise, that the nanowire battery had been cycling through more than 10,000 charges and was still going. A few days later, it was still cycling for more than 30,000 instances. It kept on going for a month.

The gel, which is thick like peanut butter, slowly seeps into the pores of the nanowires made of manganese oxide. This makes them softer, which greatly reduces their fragility. “If you could get 100,000 cycles out of a lithium-ion battery it might mean you never need to buy two of them,” said Reginald Penner, chair of the university’s chemistry department. “We’re talking about a lifetime of 20 years, maybe even longer than that.”

Le Thai and others in Penner’s team are still experimenting with gel-wrapped nanowire batteries. Meanwhile, the market is betting big on them due to their fast charging and much longer lifetime, compared to lithium-ion. The nanowire battery market is set to grow from $53 million in 2021 to $243 million by 2026, by one estimate. Most of this growth will be fueled by the high adoption rate of electric vehicles in the coming 4-5 years.