We definitely want more juice for our gadgets. I’ll always get frustrated when having to look around for an AC outlet to keep my notebook running. How I wish I could have a laptop with battery that can last for 24 hours without having to hook it up to an AC outlet.
These days, in order to overcome the inconvenience caused by short battery life on portable gadgets, the industry is striving towards making gadgets less hungry for battery power, but this only helps a little – managed to have a few more hours increased running on battery. This is definitely not satisfactory and the conclusion is we want more powerful batteries that can last for 24 hours or more.
Here comes the good news brought by a research team in Stanford University. The team led by assistant professor Yi Cui has developed a new method by using silicon anodes
Silicon has long been known having much higher charge capacity than graphite, but somehow silicon degrades quickly as it charges and discharges.
Now, the research team has overcome it by storing the battery’s lithium between various silicon nanowires, which expands as they charges and contract when they discharge. And also the new nanowires does not fracture. If this new approach is commercially viable, we’d be seeing the next generation batteries with longer life span maybe in few years’ time or more – you’d get laptop that can run on battery power for more than 40 hours.
via [Arstechnica]
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