Have you ever think of a rechargeable battery that last longer than your phone or laptop life span? That won’t remain fiction any longer thanks to the creation of a researcher from UCI.

Luck happens when preparation meets opportunity!

A mind-blowing creation has been recently announced by University of Califonia, Irvine. Doctoral student Mya Le Thai has found a rechargeable battery that lasts up to 400 years. Interestingly, this discovery is a result of playing around in the lab – a pure miraculous incident. To get into details, this laptop battery that Thai invented can last 200,000 charging cycles and lose only a tiny 5% of its original capacity. For you to easier imagine, an average laptop battery of today won’t survive after 300 or 500 cycles.

The experiment which Thai and her colleagues conducting is about the availability of nanowires in making batteries. However, the result was not promising because of the thin and fragile characteristics of the nanowires. Thai then coated the gold nanowires with MnO2 and Plexiglas-like electrolyte gel and cycled her new capacitor. She observed the result a few days later and the battery even reached 30 000 cycles.

Yet, gold nanowires, manganese dioxide, and Plexiglas-like electrolyte gel are expensive materials. As a result, the price of the battery will be raised. Therefore, scientists want to find an alternative in making this innovation more practical and applicable. Researchers are conducting the experiment with nickel as a substitution for mass production.

Future of Rechargeable Battery

This accidental but innovative creation helps reduce the amount of waste created by old batteries. Besides, this 400 year-lasting rechargeable battery also opens up a new way of battery making, especially phone batteries.