Thursday, January 3, 2008

Super long-lasting Lithium-Ion battery developed by Stanford researchers

The engineering geeks at Stanford have come up with a way to extend the capacity of current Li-ION batteries by ten times. Repeat - that’s ten times longer battery life from the same battery!

The new tech promises to boost a cellphone’s 4 hour battery life to 40 hours of uptime - an incredible feat in any book. The research team leader, Yi Cui, has already filed a patent application and hope to get battery manufacturers to adopt his new technology.

“It’s not a small improvement,” Cui said. “It’s a revolutionary development.”
Lithium-ION batteries are limited by how many ions can be stored on the battery’s anode, which is usually made of carbon. Cui has replaced the carbon anode with silicon to achieve the boost in capacity. His approach uses silicon stored in nanowire tubes that resist fracturing as the silicon swells and shrinks in proportion to the ion-load.
Let’s hope this tech hits the mainstream as soon as possible. Who wouldn’t pay a couple more bucks for a a ten-fold increase in battery life?
[source : Nanotechwire]

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