We’re excited about the possibility of a battery we can recharge forever, and no, we are not planning shutting up shop anytime soon. Our rugged batteries are far more cost-effective than the gold nanowires University of California, Irvine researchers splurged on.
However, and this is the big one, regular batteries eventually reach the end of their design life. They are simplicity to replace in home alarms and autos, but near impossible to access in research satellites orbiting the earth. There comes a time when we can no longer recycle them with solar panels, because their electrodes can no longer hold a charge.
The University of California research team has been experimenting with electrodes made from gold nanowires. If you are a detail person, you will be thrilled to know their diameter is in the order of 10−9 meters. We are okay with just knowing they are thousands of times thinner than our hair.
Being thin, gold nanowires are excellent conductors with loads of space for electrons. Nobody’s perfect. The golden wires get brittle and do not hold up to recharging in a lithium-ion battery. The California researchers are a stubborn lot. They tackled the problem by coating the nanowires in a manganese dioxide shell, but the product still did not cycle satisfactorily.
One day when the team leader was ‘playing around’ – is this what scientists do – she decided to coat the assembly with a very thin gel layer. Her combination of insight and guesswork produced an electrode that has already recycled hundreds of thousands of times without capacity loss, and is still going strong.
Is this the stuff of genius? Perhaps atom splitter Joseph Thompson was thinking of his supper when he conceived his plum pudding model of the core. We wonder what was in the team leader’s mind that day.
