They can counter the pattern of erosion that affects the cathode and anode of the battery

May 30, 2014 07:48 GMT  ·  By

Batteries are an essential part of life, being used in both wireless and wired devices, vehicles and pretty much anything else that can run for any length of time cut off from a wall socket. Alas, they have a problem: they degrade over time.

It's nothing actually visible, nothing that affects the outside of the battery. Instead, there is a certain problem that eventually kills the battery's ability to hold a charge.

Take smartphones for instance: even if you buy a new one capable of lasting for hours, days or weeks on a single charge, the battery will all but lose its ability to hold a charge in five years or so.

Until now, it wasn't understood exactly why this happened. By all accounts, the chemical substances inside the battery and the cathode/anode worked in such a way that their composition always reset after being exposed to an outside current, from a charger.

Now, though, Researches at Lawrence Berkeley, Stanford, and Brookhaven have it all figured out: it's all due to a process of erosion that affects the cathode and anode ends of the battery.

Each time the battery is charged and discharged, the battery degrades a tiny bit more. And with it all piling up over the months, it's inevitable that the battery eventually becomes all but useless.

Huolin Xin, a scientist at Brookhaven, compares the role of the anode to that of a dust or dirt particle. You might not know this, but snowflakes only form around such tiny particles, irregularities in the air as it were.

The nickel oxide anode in a battery transforms into metallic nickel through “nanoscale inhomogeneities or defects in the surface structure.”

The researchers think they can fix the problem or at least slow down the rate at which these “chinks” are left in the armor.

They theorize that a powder can be included in the chemical solution, which would reverse the imperfections of the anode over time. They already have something like that invented, but it's not ready for a test drive.

And even if they do find some powder that won't affect the chemistry of the actual power-generation solution, it might not extend the life of the battery by too much at first. In any case, it will take a few, or several, years for this breakthrough to bear any fruit.

In the meantime, maybe wireless charging will be perfected as well. A technique that wirelessly charges things across rooms instead of tiny, 1-inch distances has already been developed, and would be a perfect counterpoint to long-lived batteries.