A team of researchers from University of California, Irvine has developed nanowire-based battery material that greatly increases its lifespan and could mean never having to replace a battery again.

The researchers have been trying to look for an alternative to lithium, whose liquid state helps conduct charge but is combustible and sensitive to temperature. Nanowires have been a long-theorized dream battery material as their high surface area holds a lot of electric charge, but wire corrodes in traditional lithium environments after several thousand cycles.

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The team of five chemists including UCI doctoral candidate Mya Le Thai, they have found a way to overcome the problem with it. She coated a gold nanowire in a manganese dioxide shell and enclosed the assembly in an electrolyte made of a Plexiglas-like gel.

The enclosed wires were cycled up to 200,000 times over three months without any loss of capacity or power and without fracturing any nanowires. A 24-hour charge smartphone battery with that kind of lifetime would be good for more than 500 years.

“Mya was playing around, and she coated this whole thing with a very thin gel layer and started to cycle it. She discovered that just by using this gel, she could cycle it hundreds of thousands of times without losing any capacity,” said Reginald Penner, chair of UCI’s chemistry department.

This is not the first idea of creating nanowire batteries stronger. Researchers at the U.S. Department of Energy's Argonne National Laboratory have been working on Silicon-based nanowire batteries that could double or even triple the energy stored in conventional batteries.

Details of the study were published in ACS Energy Letters.

Tagsnanowire battery, battery, BATTERY LIFE, lithium battery