The future of batteries in electronic devices could change forever, and it's all "because" of an accidental discovery in the chemistry labs of the University of California, Irvine.
This technique is based on a material of gold nanowires covered with a thin layer of gel. Mya Le Thau, the accidental inventor of the technology, discovered that by coating gold wires with gel, the filaments of an electrolytic capacitor could retain their capacity after hundreds of thousands of charge cycles.
In the report reviewing the research, the creators explain how using these tiny wires, which are thousands of times thinner than a human hair, increases the area for electron storage and transport, while maintaining conductivity.
Although nanowires are not a new technology: they are already in use today, although they have the problem of being very brittle and of little resistance to charge-discharge cycles.
The researchers' proposed solution consists of covering them with a thin layer of gel that looks like plexiglass. In this way, the cables are protected from breakage, while maintaining their capacity.
After covering the cables and testing the technology developed, one prototype was able to withstand nearly 200,000 charge-discharge cycles over three months, without reducing the battery capacity. Currently, smartphone batteries can only survive a few thousand charge cycles before they start to lose capacity.
Unlike other discoveries and inventions of this kind, Mya Le Thau and team's proposal appears to be easily scalable to current types of batteries, and the fact of preventing nanowires from losing their capabilities is a major advance that could easily be implemented in real applications.
There's a long way to go from here until this solution is part of our cell phone batteries, but it's undoubtedly a step in the right direction, which could mean the end for batteries dying after a few years of use.