14 DAY TRIAL // If there is anything bad about today's batteries, it is that they run out of power too quickly. While a watch or fitness tracker, or even a mouse, could last for weeks or months, a smartphone won't easily make it past a day, and tablets or laptops will live even less.
There have been several attempts at creating better batteries, some of which hold promise, but improvements to existing ones have been rather scarce.
Even the methods that do come with benefits only allow for a minor increase to charge life and efficiency. It goes to show that lithium-ion batteries might be reaching their limit.
A new development might not help much with this particular problem, but it could allow batteries to live longer before they start to degrade. A team of researchers from the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC) can prove it.
Snail shell-based batteries
The scientists came up with the idea to base their new battery design on the way mollusks are able to control how peptides (strings of amino acids) dictate the growth of their shells. They found that the snails have a high control over how the nanoscale structures form.
From there, they theorized that the method could be used as a blueprint, of sorts, for a new kind of battery chemistry that can render lithium-ion batteries longer lasting, as well as lighter.
It has already been proven that nanostructured electrodes offer more active sites for electrochemical reactions to occur if they have a greater surface area.
Objects between one and 100 nanometers in size enable different chemical reactions and can be even unpredictable, but the benefits cannot be denied.
Sadly, the scientists could not just use the same peptide as the snails, but they were able to screen more than one billion possible candidates using a procedure called Phage Display.
They screened a commercially available library for it, basically, with lithium manganese nickel oxide washing off those that didn't work (LMNO).
After they found one, they combined it with another peptide known to stick to carbon nanotubes, to act as conductive nanowires in lithium-ion electrodes. All the while, the nanoscale architecture can improve power and cycling stability.
Benefits and drawbacks
We already mentioned the benefits (longer lifespan) but the drawback, if it can be called that, is that the breakthrough won't enable any increase in battery charge life.