Revolutionary nanowire battery delivers 10x the charge of lithium-ion

Alex Zaharov-Reutt
Wednesday, 16 January 2008 14:17

Opinion and Analysis

The original Stanford article on the nanowire discovery has the details of how the lithium silicon nanowires came to be used in batteries and how they succeeded where years of previous research yielded batteries with too little power output and too few recharge cycles.

But to summarise, when silicon is traditionally used in a battery, in place of the normally used carbon, battery life can be greatly extended, but with one big problem: silicon swelling during charging, and shrinking during use.

This constant ‘expand/shrink’ cycle pulverises the silicon inside the battery and helps it to destroy itself.

According to the Stanford article, the nanowire battery uses lithium “stored in a forest of tiny silicon nanowires, each with a diameter one-thousandth the thickness of a sheet of paper. The nanowires inflate four times their normal size as they soak up lithium. But, unlike other silicon shapes, they do not fracture” – and thus work to reliably much more energy than ever before.

Without nanotechnology, this battery breakthrough would not have been possible, and while there are undoubtedly even better battery technologies yet to be invented that can store and deliver even more power, nanowire batteries look set to deliver the revolutionary leap in battery life the digital age has been so impatiently waiting for.

Let’s hope one or more of the major battery companies jump on this development and fast tracks the first true breakthrough in ultra long battery life in the small battery sizes we’re used to, forever changing and improving the way we store and use our portable power – please don’t let this technology end up somewhere on a shelf!