Nanotechnology Yields A More Powerful Rechargeable Battery - Stanford University
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A team of scientists from Stanford University’s Department of Materials and Science Engineering, under the direction of Assistant Professor Yi Cui, have made a breakthrough discovery in regards to rechargeable battery life. By using a sponge-like network of silicon nanowires as the battery anode, replacing today’s graphite, the amount of lithium held by the anode increased by tenfold.
What does this mean for you? This means that we could potentially see 40 hour laptop batteries in the near future! No more short battery life and having to race around looking for your power adapter before your laptop shuts off due to a drained battery. Cui has filed a patent on this technology and is evaluating if the technology will be liscensed to an existing battery manufacturer or if a new company will be formed. Get ready to invest heavily!! Does anyone smell an IPO? I do, and it smells like money!
That’s All I Got,
4four1ones
One Comment
Ranbo
September 10th, 2008
at 12:17pm
40-hour laptop batteries would be nice, but I think we’re missing the bigger picture here. WIth 10x battery life, electric cars finally become reasonable. In addition, it also becomes practical to store enough energy collected by solar panels during the day to run all night (and sell some back to the “grid”).
Nanotechnology is also developing solar panels that are 10x cheaper than current levels. That means it could become possible to coat a house’s roof with solar for $2000, store the excess in home batteries, and use the home batteries to charge up car batteries in the evening.
Getting those 3 things going (nano-solar, and nano batteries in houses and cars) would completely revolutionize how we get and use power. Suddenly we would have little use for foreign oil; pollution would be largely eliminated; and of course the cost of energy would drop dramatically.
Being able to not plug in a laptop is just a nice perk.