A doctoral student at the University of California, Irvine (UCI) made one of the most amazing discoveries in recent years and it was sort of an accident.
Maybe you’ve heard the adage that “Luck happens when preparation meets opportunity.” This story is one of the best examples of how true this can be.
Doctoral student Mya Le Thai was just playing around in the lab when she made a discovery that could lead to a rechargeable battery that could last up to 400 years. This could lead to longer-lasting laptops, smartphones, and fewer lithium-ion batters filling up our landfills.
A team of researchers at UCI had been experimenting with nanowires for possible use in batteries. They found that over time, the thin, fragile wires break down and crack after enough charging cycles. This is when a battery goes from full to empty and then back to full again.
On a whim one day, Thai coated a set of gold nanowires in manganese dioxide and a Plexiglas-like electrolyte gel.
Reginald Penner, the chair of the university’s chemistry department, said, ”She started to cycle these gel capacitors, and that’s when we got the surprise.”
He continued, ”She said, ‘this thing has been cycling 10,000 cycles and it’s still going.’ She came back a few days later and said ‘it’s been cycling for 30,000 cycles.’ That kept going on for a month.”
The average laptop battery lasts 300 to 500 charge cycles, the nanobattery developed at UCI made it through 200,000 cycles in three months. This means the life of the average laptop battery could be extended by about 400 years.
“The big picture is that there may be a very simple way to stabilize nanowires of the type that we studied,” Penner said. “If this turns out to be generally true, it would be a great advance for the community.”
That’s a pretty good discovery for just fooling around in the lab.
