Traditional battery technology such as lithium-ion is susceptible to breakage of nanowires in the batteries through repeated charging and discharging.

>The UCI researchers have solved this problem by coating a gold nanowire in a manganese dioxide shell and wrapping the assembly in an electrolyte made of a Plexiglas-like gel. The combination is reliable and resistant to failure. With the technique Mya Le Thai has invented, the team developed a prototype that endured nearly 200,000 recharge cycles over the course of three months.

If this technology can be scaled to modern battery capacities, power ratings, and form factors, this could revolutionize how sustainable going to electric can truly be. Do you think this is a discovery that can scale to the market?

Would a gold nanowire be susceptible to breaking in a vehicle?

I wonder if they've started receiving death threats from the disposable battery companies yet?

The following submission statement was provided by /u/otvortex:

Traditional battery technology such as lithium-ion is susceptible to breakage of nanowires in the batteries through repeated charging and discharging.

>The UCI researchers have solved this problem by coating a gold nanowire in a manganese dioxide shell and wrapping the assembly in an electrolyte made of a Plexiglas-like gel. The combination is reliable and resistant to failure. With the technique Mya Le Thai has invented, the team developed a prototype that endured nearly 200,000 recharge cycles over the course of three months.

If this technology can be scaled to modern battery capacities, power ratings, and form factors, this could revolutionize how sustainable going to electric can truly be. Do you think this is a discovery that can scale to the market?

Please reply to OP's comment here: https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/10dpmoz/uci_researchers_discover_nanowire_coating/j4mlrf7/

If even 1/10th of the "revolutionary breakthroughs" we've been hearing about every single month for years end up being practical and hit mass production we will have instantly charging huge capacity indefinitely lasting batteries in the near future. I wonder though.

People who make batteries also sell batteries, and they don't want you to have one that lasts forever. Nationalize all battery manufacturing asap.

Wouldn't it need to scale up much, much further than modern battery capacities? Modern battery capacity and life expectancy seems to be a major bottleneck in the energy transition, as I understand it. Generating power from sustainable sources is relatively easy, storing large quantities and transporting it far from the source is really difficult. Home batteries are prohibitively expensive at very low capacities and slow charging rate. Even the cheapest large scale energy storage method, pumped storage hydropower, is being implemented at a depressingly slow pace.

Not to mention the difficulty in gathering the amounts of gold and building the large scale factories required, that's going to impact the environment negatively just like lithium mining and battery manufacturing does.

If this can be scaled up to high density, modular and relatively mobile multi-GWh applications it will be absolutely revolutionary. That's a huge if though...

These articles are just meant to get publicity so they can get more funding.

Unfortunately the holy grail for battery technology is like nuclear fusion, it has been promised 6 times a year every year.

More like 6 times a month

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Thats true, and tech journalists absolutely love it with no thought to viability or if they are being sold snake oil

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Especially since this discovery is in a completely different league from the usual 'breakthroughs'. Cracking how to stop nanowires from cracking is huge for a number of fields, one of which is batteries. It is also a lot more fundamental than usual.

And of course there is a long and uncertain road between gold nanowires in a lab and mass-produced batteries, but still, just knowing a 200k cycling battery with no degradation is even possible is valuable. I'd love there to be some NASA rovers with undying tech.

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(They) Don’t care, (they) got the clicks. (I’m) Still an optimistic fool here though.

It'd sink an entire market.

It wont survive for the same reason that cures don't see the light of day because treatments are more profitable.

eh? Did you write it? Didn't get my click, tired of bait articles.

These all add up to "we won't hear about it again". Which more or less seems to be the case nearly all of the time with these battery announcements.

Granted, I don’t know anything about battery technology, but I tend to be very wary about headlines using words like “forever”

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And they still aren't the be all for screens. Also, they were going on about OLEDs in the 90s even.

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"could" is doing a lot of heavy lifting in this article.

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But there's an entire new cure for hepatitis which didn't exist before, and there's also the cure for many bacterial diseases like penicillin or streptomycin. And many preventative ones, like the polio vaccine.

...... Wow, you're basically exhibit A of an armchair scientist Redditor. Someone who doesn't know anything, doesn't track the current zietgeist, and speaks as if he's been studying this for decades.

The only benefit to your argument is that it's impossible for me by design to point at cures that have been suppressed out of profit motive.

That's right. Because your statement is stupid.

Nope. You are entirely too credulous.

Just because you're cynical doesn't mean you're correct. Come on. Find a cure that's been suppressed

> Even the cheapest large scale energy storage method, pumped storage hydropower, is being implemented at a depressingly slow pace.

Well, yeah, because it takes A LOT of real estate do so. Falling water doesn't generate as much energy as you might think.

Modern cell phones last all day while running 1gbps modems and using neural network hardware for voice recognition and refreshing screens at 120hz, and more, while getting thinner. This is entirely due to battery tech advances.

There’s far more financial incentive to advance things

No, you won't hear about it. You don't sound like the kind of person to seek information out or to keep up with further developments. It goes against a cynical philosophy, after all.

Do we actually need a battery in every day life that will last millennia?

I mean if a batter lasts 10 years, it’s going to be completely out of date by that time and we will have batteries that are the same weight and size but hold 10 times the charge.

It’s the same as fusion energy. Now we have solar and wind, by the time it’s successfully built, it will be completely useless. Useful only for a few very limited use cases,

Here I am, with a list of developments I've kept hopeful track of, but ok.

Reasons for hope:

• John Goodenough's battery

• XNRGI's battery

• Lyten lithum sulfur batteries

• solar shingles

• SpaceX

• magnetic reconnection space drive (Fatima Ebrahimi) (2021) hopes to have a first prototype soon

• Mach Effect

• "augmented reality", HoloLens

• hot fusion companies (including Apollo Fusion)

• Quaise Energy geothermal power

• detonation engine for rockets

• NMN

• Gaianneschi fatty acid drug delivery (2019, no news since)

• DpC

• TREM

• ISRIB: small molecue cognitive enhanc

• PAMPS hydrogel for cartilege = Bolt Biotheraputics's ISAC anti-cancer therapy

• Alkahest young blood plasma for brain healing

• αKLOTHO and TGFβR2 treatment for osteoarthritis

• NaNots (NaNotics) - subtractive nanoparticles

• Senisca - correcting dysregulation of RNA processing (2021)

• retrolytics (2020, Andrew Gudkov)

• GlyNAC (Rajagopal Sekhar)

• LyGenesis (2022, starting first human trial)

• Lomecel-B

• senolytics

• David Sinclair (Harvard)'s anti-aging pill (SOCOM trial)

• elements from young blood

• hypothalamus regeneration

• trodusquemine (aka MSI-1436) = Novo Biosciences is struggling for funding

• Underdog Pharmaceuticals - now Cyclarity - clearing arteriosclerosis

• LNP mRNA to restore heart function by reprogramming T cells to remove fibrotic cells (Jan 2022)

• carbon nanotubes for atherosclerosis (2020)

• Mitrix Bio - harvesting healthy mitochondria from a bioreactor for transplant

• Satellite Bio

• mRNA delivery of Stemin and YAP5SA to repair hearts (Robert Schwartz) 2022

• anti-CD47 and other immune system activating treatments

• iNKT cell reinvigoration via galactosylceramide (2018)

• SeNBD (May 2021)

• MuTaTo (2019)

• metarrestin - preventing metastasis - now in a phase I clinical trial (2021)

• Hadiyah-Nicole Green (nano-particles with laser therapy) Ora Lee Smith Center (2020) trying to crowdfund there was another group that reported results with this... from Wales maybe?

• PRL3-zumab humanized antibody binds PRL3 thereby inhibiting tumors, phase II clinical trial (2021)

• GP532 a TLR5 agonist, Andrei Gudkov (2021)

• MR1 (Enara Bio) (universal anti-cancer T cell therapy) (2020)

• T cells: BAFT upregulation

• allogenic iNKT (invariant natural killer) cells, Yang Lab (2021)

• nanoparticles from maize (2022)

• aspirin could cut risk of death in cancer

• ELANE/PPE (2021, Becker, Onchilles Pharma)

• Clinically translatable cytokine delivery platform for eradication of intraperitoneal tumors (2022, Nash and Veish) (drug factory beads)

• albumin nanoparticle (2022, Duxin Sun)

• dostarlimab (PD-1 inhibitor, anti-cancer) (2022)

• cancer-killing “drug factory” implants ( Veiseh, Avenge Bio) 2022 -LIfT BioSciences N-LIfT

Revisit later:

• plasminogen supplement? (sea squirt)

Dud list:

• BLP
• MKC8866

I look at this at solving a big problem in multiple ways! It would eliminate you having to drop 20 grand plus to replace battery car batteries!

It may help the power storage issues with solar and wind! And it may keep millions of lithium batteries out of the landfills!

Seems like scalability may not be a big issue because it could mesh right in with the way we make the millions of batteries that are currently being made!

It also help save some rain forest destruction for Lithium mining!

Yeah but until they make channel bugs illegal I won't buy one! Burn-in sucks!

Seems like it would be some very hard to break shit.

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This "news" is from 5 years ago!

"This article originally appeared on 11.03.17"

https://www.upworthy.com/uci-student-accidentally-creates-a-rechargeable-battery-that-lasts-400-years

Also, this UCI YouTube video announcing this news is dated 6 years ago:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p7uv4mRUNgQ

I found this 2016 article about this same story, same researcher etc : https://www.orangecoast.com/stuff-we-love/uci-doctoral-candidate-mya-le-thai-energy-storage-breakthrough/

Did not read thoroughly but didn't see any new developments.

Whenever I see advancements like this, I imagine a boardroom panic of industry leaders to figure out how to impose planned obsolescence to the technology.

Yeah sometimes I leave it on the news channels or CNBC for hours but every channel has them!

If you changed the TV channel and don't know what channel you changed it to you can always hit the info button or channel guide!

I just see no use for them! The networks can all put identifier info hidden in the picture that is not always in the corner and always on top!

Even the news scroll or stock scroll can cause burn in! The early OLED sets were really bad and even though the new sets have better burn in tech you can still get it! Even in certain games! I have seen shots of it even in this group!

Very cool having a non degrading battery build, but what is the energy density by weight compared to what we're using now?

Actually no we’d have solved shit because at every turn it’s “well this will never work let’s give up immediately! We have no more willpower or brainpower to wonder or think of experiment”

Which says a LOT about them and their mindsets. Some people don’t get the same education as others and it’s really sad to see.

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I got a cheap used oled on Craigslist and accidentally left a game paused on a bright screen for half an hour. Burnt in yay

This would be great for space applications. For commercial use maybe we only get this in premium products only.

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Same man i have the first Samsung galaxy seem space for me at the time, payed whit a parts of my liver ---> 10 years later another smartphone payed 100 euro more features that the original galaxy, more faster more battery, better response time, fingerprints OLED display ecc ecc payed 1/7 of the original galaxy.

I mean the tecnology move maybe slow but it move I'm really excited to see what we can have in 10/20/30/40/50 years maybe 60 if I'm luck.

P.s: I'm checking the graphic cards right now I see for the same price I have buy the 970 long time ago I can now buy 3090 -.-, this is the tecnology tech need to make thing more easy to reproduce and inexpensive, only in this way we can progress.

Wow wow wow, this is not wat the corporate fatcats want; planned obsolescence is the name of the game, we will keep selling you the same products repeatedly FOREVER 👹

Not really, no. If this even gets close to current tech and make batteries as invincible as they say, you could have lifetime batteries. Take a power wall. Even with minimal usage it needs to be replaced 20-25 years down the line. Same for bigger storage, like for large renewable energy storage. Sure you can make a 50 story building full of batteries if you want, but 25 years later you have to do it again.

But what if they ran 10,000 years? All of the sudden it's a lot more interesting for long term investment. Especially if it's a company that rents it out. Current lithium ion batteries have like 2,000 full charge cycles if you're nice to it. This says 200,000. That's 100x more, which would actually be more like 200,000 years. I just said 10k because 200k sounds ludicrous.

Plus, it would be practically permanent for homes. Imagine new builds just have a power wall just built in with a week of power storage that never gets weaker. Amazing.

Throw in the dropping cost of solar panels, along with the fact they actually keep working well past the recommended, 25 year replacement window, and we could have neighborhoods of houses that are self sufficient, or even feeding the grid. Hell, they could feed other people's invincible batteries that haven't bought the panels yet, or retrofitted the power wall.

On top of all that, electric cars! Those engines chug past 500k easy all the time. But when the batteries need replacing the cost can be pretty extreme. It's why the older plug in hybrids aren't as attractive as older gas cars. If you had a frame that had permanent batteries, you could basically rebuild the whole car over and over until it rusted out or something. Electric cars are (or at least, can be) a lot easier to fix and rebuild too.

No fuel pump, worrying about fuel/air mixture, timing, spark plugs, changing oil, etc. Basically a charge controller, battery, engine. Maybe a transmission lol. But then, I don't know if these would handle the movement well enough. The article doesn't make it sound like an issue, but idk.

For phones and laptops and whatever, they could even make batteries that go between devices. If nothing else they'd at least be worth recycling. We just throw away lithium because collecting a billion phones and extracting out the lithium isn't economically worth it.

But if you can just pull a battery out and it works like brand new, you're good to go. Standardize like a car battery and almost any "recycled" battery could just be stacked within the standard size for bulk storage or whatever. Easier than designing new devices around batteries and way easier to assemble. Really as long as the storage and voltage is the same the exact size doesn't matter as much.

Although I'm sure there's still some risk carrying all that power, it sounds like there's no volatile chemicals to burst into flame like lithium. Might zap tf out of things and start them on fire though... I bet "in town" cars like china's little EVs would take off like crazy too. Nicer cars could practically become family heirlooms. You can upgrade with new motors or controllers or whatever. Sure we'll improve on them over time, but if you can push 300 mile range it's practical for nearly everyone as a daily driver for a long time into the future.

As far as gold use, I thought that too. But if they're coating it anyways, I'm pretty sure they could use silver.

Googled it, they totally could.

>Silver has the highest electrical conductivity of all metals. In fact, silver defines conductivity - all other metals are compared against it. On a scale of 0 to 100, silver ranks 100, with copper at 97 and gold at 76.

From another source: https://www.mysmartprice.com/gear/graphene-gold-nanowire-future-battery-tech-looks-promising/

>And since nanowires are smaller than the tip of your hair, you can achieve a large surface area by bundling them together. As a result, gold nanowire batteries offer higher storage capacity.

This is a little rabbit hole for me now. Seems like they can actually integrate this into existing batteries.

>This noble idea of improving the battery tech involves a noble metal. Researchers at the University of California have developed a process involving gold nanowires that can increase the longevity of batteries by hundreds of times.

Emphasis mine. Saw a few references elsewhere, but not much in depth. Seems like they can use nano wires with existing tech. Not the end goal though.

I guess they're thinking nickel as a next try.

>For mass production, researchers are hopeful to replace gold with nickel to keep the manufacturing costs in check.

On top of that, Intel is collaborating on a copper foam 3D battery. Instead of a flat sheet (like smartphones) or a flat sheet rolled around (cylindrical batteries) it's almost a spray in foam. They could basically build a frame and spray foam the battery into it. Then there's this!

Lithium:

>Energy Density 185 to 220 Wh/L and Power Density 245 to 430 W/Kg

Copper foam:

>...expected to have power densities reaching 14,000 W/L while maintaining energy densities of 650 Wh/L.

Copper foam is mostly air (crazy!) so W/kg is hardly worth checking. But I found this neat quote

>One of her battery prototypes, for example, doesn’t store energy at 100% of its theoretical capacity, but it’s safer than conventional models—it can be heated or shorted without igniting.

The theoretical capacity is already so high it hardly matters. Apparently it could start getting produced already if they wanted to.

>A big lesson that Prieto is now learning about industry is when to say something is ready for market. “As an academic scientist, you always know you can make your process or compounds or devices better,” she says. In industry, “when you see that what you have can actually meet a need in a particular market, then you have to say, ‘Good enough.’ ”

They're still working on tooling and optimizing production, but it's basically copper foam with an electrolyte layer for conductivity. I saw 100,000 charge cycles with no issue, but I lost the page now.

Tl;dr: Gold is unlikely to be used in commercial products. Probably nickel or an alloy. But capacity and charge/discharge are already great. It could also be used to improve existing batteries without having to completely switch. It would massively increase lifespan. Other battery tech is also very promising, and finally becoming realistic.

The terms "nanowire" and "UC Irvine" gave me deja vu. So I decided to go back to a wikipedia Wikipedia article on "nanowire", which I recently read.

Wonderful plagiarism. I found the below link from the Wikipedia article.

https://phys.org/news/2016-04-chemists-battery-technology-off-the-charts-capacity.html

Almost the same thing. It was written in April 20, 2016.

>The researchers think the goo plasticizes the metal oxide in the battery and gives it flexibility, preventing cracking.
>
>"The coated electrode holds its shape much better, making it a more reliable option," Thai said. "This research proves that a nanowire-based battery electrode can have a long lifetime and that we can make these kinds of batteries a reality."

Both from the linked article and the phys.org link.

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Titles like these remind me of snapchat articles. Batteries will never last forever. Nothing will, I expected better from you

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"Just because your cynical doesn't mean you're correct. "

Man that's a brave thing to say on reddit. This site gets kind of exhausting sometimes because how many people seem to think that way.

Fist off, I just want to say how awesome this is and how much I hope it succeeds. The type of improvement this would make on society is incredible.

With that being said, what company would actually implement this in their product? It would be amazing for consumers, but terrifying for companies who rely on selling these products. For example, Apple has fought tooth and nail to prevent people from repairing their phones, including swapping the battery. Sure technology advances happen and they get better over time, but if that was a big enough incentive to upgrade, companies wouldn't fight right to repair so hard.

Imagine a company did go out and use it. Would they realistically be able to survive without selling you subscriptions or limiting the lifespan in other ways? History has not shown that business models selling devices once work well.

Honestly curious if anyone else has an idea on how this could work.

A new battery technology that will never happen? Neat!

And unfortunately the best of these advancements will likely never reach consumers because things that work too well or last too long are not profitable.

Gold is already used in plenty of electronics, though.

And~ people spill coffee on their fancy gaming computer all the time.

So even if optimally stored is 200 000 times more charges, I'm sure plenty of consumers will frick with things.

Keep seeing this and wind touted as next gen solutions when under sea currents are 24/7 and produce far more power. Why aren’t ppl rushing to build more undersea power gens?

Because the water is filled with salt, and any generator you use is going to necessarily need to have some metal components. They'll be destroyed by rust in days.

Even if this tech only doubled or tripled the useful life of a battery (to 40-70 years), that alone would be a cost game-changer for so many applications.

That's very true, but it's possible and doesn't have to be expensive. Especially in mountainous areas with rivers which already utilize hydropower or coastal areas with existing dykes.

Plans for PSH reservoirs spanning a few dozen square km with pump turbines that work both ways (pump water out, generate electricity when water flows in) are ready to be executed. The expertise required lies with the engineering companies that built the Delta Works in the Netherlands, the Thames Barrier, the Dubai Palm Islands, Bath County Pumped Storage Station etc.

I think the issue is the huge up front investment these projects require, despite PSH being the cheapest storage method at very high scale and capacity. There's just not much profit to be made in that market outside of China it seems

That’s not a concern. Many under water turbine designs are being used.

Love this in depth reply! Thank you, I'm going to read it attentively

Figure out how to make it profitable, and it'll happen over night.

I hope you're right.

Great post and very informative! I think that states like Texas will need longer range batteries! People who live in some parts of Texas will drive hours just to go to the grocery store!

We all know Texas is big right. It is really brought home when you drive out there! I drove out there for a job I was working on and you think you are maybe a few hours away after you hit the eastern border but you are days away! Now this was before gps was invented but Texas is frigging huge!

More dually Crew Cab Trucks are sold there than anywhere else because of need to have plenty of room to put all the groceries and other needs when they go to town!

They will need longer range batteries and bigger motors to haul the whole famdamnly and weeks or months worse of groceries! Which is possible now that battery Tractor Trailers are out!

But for once I am getting excited about electric vehicles! I was always saying that they will never be popular until battery technology got better! That time is coming now! And nobody wants to have to drop 25,000 for new batteries! That is why so many early adopters of battery cars sell them early!