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Written by Daniel
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Tuesday, 15 January 2008 11:53 |
A tenfold improvement in battery life?
By Alex Serpo
Special to CNET News.com
Published: January 15, 2008, 7:35 AM PST
Stanford University researchers have made a discovery that could signal the arrival of laptop batteries that last more than a day on a single charge.
The researchers have found a way to use silicon nanowires to give rechargeable lithium ion batteries--used in laptops, iPods, video cameras, and mobile phones--as much as 10 times more charge. This potentially could give a conventional battery-powered laptop 40 hours of battery life, rather than 4 hours.
The new batteries were developed by assistant professor Yi Cui and colleagues at Stanford University's Department of Materials Science and Engineering.
"It's not a small improvement," Cui said. "It's a revolutionary development."
Citing a research paper they wrote, published in Nature Nanotechnology, Cui said the increased battery capacity was made possible though a new type of anode that utilizes silicon nanowires. Traditional lithium ion batteries use graphite as the anode. This limits the amount of lithium--which holds the charge--that can be held in the anode, and it therefore limits battery life.
Silicon anodes have the "the highest theoretical charge capacity" according to Ciu's paper, but they expand when charging and shrink during use: a cycle that causes the silicon to be pulverized, degrading the performance of the battery. For 30 years, this dead end stumped researchers, who poured their battery life-extending energy into improving graphite-based anodes.
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