Of all the things that could go wrong with our beloved mobile devices, it's generally the battery that ends up letting us down first. In fact, it's rare for any smartphone or laptop that depends on a lithium-ion battery to go more than three years without significant loss of battery capacity.
Scientists working at the University of California, Irvine, believe they've accidentally stumbled upon a technique that could take that three-year average lifespan and boost it to an astounding 300 or 400 years. Such a breakthrough would greatly increase the lifespan of products, reduce waste and even help increase the mileage range of electric vehicles.
The key to achieving this breakthrough involves the integration of a material thousands of times smaller than a human hair. Called nanowires, these remarkable structures are able to store more than 10 times the energy of existing lithium-ion technology. Unfortunately, the filaments have proven to be extremely fragile under the stresses of charging, generally becoming brittle and breaking after only a few thousand charge cycles.
To move beyond the current standard of 500 to 3,000 charging cycles for the lithium-ion batteries in your phone or laptop, scientists would have to figure out a way to protect the nanowires from this dramatic erosion. Enter UCI doctoral candidate Mya Le Thai who, like other great accidental inventors, came up with a solution by simply experimenting in the lab.
[excerpted]http://www.mnn.com/earth-matters/energy/blogs/this-rechargeable-battery-lasts-400-yearsNot sure I agree with the "...accidentally stumbled upon..." claim since the scientist in question was actually working to find a technique. Trial and error isn't an "accident" in science when properly accounted for.
