New technology promises tenfold battery life improvement
January 03, 2008

Researchers at Stanford university have developed a new technology that could increase the amount of energy that can be stored in an lithium ion battery up to ten times. The breakthrough is based on tried technology and the researches are hoping to be able to make it commercial relatively fast.

- This is not a small improvement, it is a revolutionary development, comments Yi Cui, leader of the research project and main author of the research article published in Nature Nanotechnoly.

Lithium ion batteries are, toghether with the lithium polymer batteries, the dominating battery technology in consumer electronics, such as portable computers and mobile phones. What limits the energy storage capacity is the amount of lithium that can be stored in the anode of the battery.

Today the anode is usually made out of coal. It has been known for quite some time that silicon has a vastly superior lithium storage capacity compared to coal. The problem with silicon is that it expands when storing lithium and retracts when the battery is discharged. This pulverizes the anode making it impossible to recharge the battery.

The researches at Stanford has been able to circumvent this problem by using a technology called nanostrings. The lithium is stored in a tiny forest of nano-sized silicon strings. The nanostrings swell up to about four times its initial size when absorbing lithium, but do not burst. Using this fact, silicon becomes a realistic material to use in battery anodes.

Yi Cui has applied for a patent and is considering starting a company and contacting the battery manufacturers to make this new technology commercial. He points out that all parts of the manufacturing process are well-known and that it would be possible to scale up the technology quite easily.

Source: Nanotechwire.com (via intomobile.com).

By: Elias Nordling, Jonas Kämpe