Getting a Charge Out of Nanowires

The good news on my recent 14-hour flight to Beijing was that my laptop's battery lasted only 2 hours. So I could kick back with a crossword puzzle, paperback novel, and blissfully relax. However, the bad news was that my laptop's battery lasted only 2 hours. Sigh. I had a lot of work to do that didn't get done — as the boss was quick to point out.

But 2-hour battery charges may be a thing of the past if Yi Cui, an assistant professor at Stanford University, has his way. What Cui and his team — Candace Chan, Halin Peng, Robert A. Huggins, Gao Liu, Kevin McIlwrath, and Xiao Feng Zhang — have come up with is a way of using nanotechnology to produce 10 times the amount of electricity of existing lithium-ion batteries. That means that laptops like yours and mine could operate for up to 20 hours.

With Cui's battery, lithium is stored in a forest of tiny silicon nanowires, each with a diameter 1/1000 the thickness of a sheet of paper. The nanowires inflate to four times their normal size as they soak up lithium but, unlike the silicon in the current generation of lithium-ion batteries, they do not fracture. For their experiments, Chan grew the nanowires on a stainless steel substrate, providing an excellent electrical connection.

And no one is happier about it than the boss.

— Jonathan Erickson
jerickson@ddj.com

Posted by Jon Erickson at 10:55 AM  Permalink