As reported on the website of the University of California, Irvine (UCI), the student may Le Thai to (Mya Le Thai) accidentally created a battery that loses capacity after hundreds of thousands of recharge cycles.
A typical commercial lithium-ion battery can withstand 200 to 400 recharge cycles. Experienced battery of PhD student within three months of the experiments survived 200 000 cycles of charge and discharge and not lost their original capacity.
Mei Le studied the properties of different materials as the basis for rechargeable batteries with lithium-ion electrolyte. In one experiment she covered gold nanoproduce manganese dioxide and concluded all in the electrolyte in the form of highly plastic gel type of plexiglass. Received the battery and began the “miracle”, which no one expected, even the leaders of the Mei, they admitted in the article. It is assumed that the plastic gel nanoprotect gives the necessary resistance to fracture that increases the resistance of the electrodes to wear during charge and discharge, which are accompanied by drops in temperature and, consequently, the microstrain.
Scientists do not yet know exactly how and why this battery was able to withstand hundreds of thousands of recharge cycles. Ahead of a huge work on studying of the phenomenon. Undoubtedly, this is a new approach in science
They say that if you sit behind typewriters a million monkeys, you will work is not worse than Shakespeare. We can only rejoice that graduate students have access to chemical laboratories. I can only imagine what they would be able to “invent” if they, for example, gave access to the Large hadron Collider.
Let’s hope that at least this breakthrough in the production of batteries will reach us in the form of ready-made solutions, having disappeared mysteriously in the bowels of the labs and the patent office, like many such discoveries of the past years.
