A Student Just Made A Battery That'll Last 400 Years

Some people will spend their whole lives striving to invent or create something that will change the world forever. Yet with life being the unpredictable mistress that it is, it's just as likely that some of the world's greatest inventions will come about by accident.

Whether it's old treasure or even a new color, these surprise discoveries just seemed to be resting right under our noses and just waiting for someone to go about their day and stumble across them.

While it's true that these explosive finds can be revealed by people who were trying to do something completely different, sometimes it's just a matter of things turning out way better than you expected them to.

That's what was going on in the case of a UC Irvine PhD student who was just trying to find a way to extend battery life.

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You've likely noticed that your phone battery loses power a lot quicker the more you charge it. 

That's because of the nanowires hanging out inside the batteries. They conduct electricity really well and allow your phone to do all the wonderful things it does, but they're also pretty fragile.

That's exactly the problem Ph.D. student Mya Le Thai was trying to solve.

As the head of her school's chemistry department worded it, "Usually these batteries decline rapidly after only five or six thousand cycles, seven thousand at the most."

Considering how often we charge our phones, 5,000 cycles is nowhere near as much as it sounds.

So how did Thai solve this problem? With gold!

Yes, she used gold nanowires and encased them in an electrolyte gel that works a little like Plexiglass. This combination was supposed to be reliable and resistant to failure.

But nobody involved expected this creation to be as reliable as it turned out.

Over the course of three months, Thai's team put this special battery through 200,000 charge cycles. Once they were done, she saw that the nanowires didn't show their usual cracks and the battery capacity hadn't degraded at all.

So what does this mean for any product lucky enough to have this battery in it?

Some estimates suggest the battery could power a smartphone or laptop for 400 years.

As far as researchers could tell, this battery works so well because the gel made the metal oxide inside the battery more flexible and prevented the cracking that usually kills battery power.

So when can we expect to get these batteries?

Unfortunately, there's a bit of a problem with getting these on the market at the moment. Namely, Thai's nanowires are made of gold, and getting manufacturers to include such an expensive material in phone batteries may be a tough sell.

For this reason, researchers aren't quite ready to try and get the battery on the market.

First, they're going to try making the nanowires out of some other materials and see if the gel works just as well on cheaper alternatives.

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h/t Business Insider