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Nanotech Anode Promises 10X Battery Life

Posted by kdawson on from the all-day-laptop dept.

UNIMurph sends word out of Stanford University that researchers have discovered a way to increase battery life tenfold by using silicon nanowires. Quoting News.com: 'It's not a small improvement,' [lead researcher Yi] Cui said. 'It's a revolutionary development.' Citing a research paper they wrote, published in Nature Nanotechnology, Cui said the increased battery capacity was made possible though a new type of anode that utilizes silicon nanowires. Traditional lithium ion batteries use graphite as the anode. This limits the amount of lithium — which holds the charge — that can be held in the anode, and it therefore limits battery life... 'We are working on scaling up and evaluating the cost of our technology,' Cui said. 'There are no roadblocks for either of these.'"

5 of 193 comments (clear)

  1. Sony by calebt3 · · Score: 2, Funny

    This is Sony's way of making a military-grade exploding battery.

  2. Re:Dupe by MichaelSmith · · Score: 2, Funny

    Damn I thought we were going to get a factor of 100 improvement in battery capacity.

    --
    http://michaelsmith.id.au
  3. OK... by All+Names+Have+Been · · Score: 3, Funny

    "...There are no roadblocks for either of these."

    So quit with the jibber-jabber and make with the 50 hour laptop battery.

  4. Re:Am I the only one getting sick of this? by mw22 · · Score: 4, Funny

    So where's the "NotGonnaHappen" tag? That's not going to happen.
  5. You were beaten to it by Kupfernigk · · Score: 3, Funny
    During the Falklands "war", it was discovered that the British Ministry of Defence had managed to supply the Army with radios that used rechargeable batteries, but no battery chargers below brigade level.* The Army was reduced to using heliographs on some occasions.

    After the event, there were several studies of what to do about it. One suggestion was to make available lithium batteries as an alternative. The cells proposed were really quite big. After a few interesting incidents in testing, one of which had an engineer cowering behind a filing cabinet screaming "get that wire away from that thing", one REME officer suggested that with a simple piece of spring loaded steel, the cells could find an alternative use as emergency grenade substitutes. (Disappointingly, the actual solution proposed was to fit an internal fuse.)

    Given the energy density of this proposal, a simple micro-Sterling generator driven by sticks of dynamite might be safer in the briefcase.

    *The Ministry of Defence is kind of like the Pentagon, but without the competence.

    --
    From scarped cliff or quarried stone she cries "A thousand types are gone, I care for nothing, no not one."