Sugar Coated Sand Bringing More Talk Time To Your Cellphone Battery
I know I have been talking quite a bit about nanotubes in the last couple months. The truth of the matter is that we seem to be on the verge of a technological battery revolution. There are many companies researching carbon nanotubes in conjunction with batteries as these wonders have an amazing potential for what they can do for our laptop, mp3, cellphone, and other portable gadgets that we love. The ingenious researchers over at Shenyang National Laboratory for Materials Science over in China have been working to improve our beloved lithium-ion batteries.
As I’ve written before about the shortcomings of the lithium technology, mostly heat and the slow degradation caused by the formation of a solid electrolyte film that raises the resistance and can prevent the battery from fully charging. Some researchers have tried adding silicon into the negative electrode to improve the charging capacity. Problem is that this destroys the capacity as it alloys then de-alloys in the charging cycles.
What the brains at Shengyang lead by Hui-Ming Cheng have been working on is to turn to the carbon nanotube. They have been growing the nanotubes onto tiny particles of silicon by using the carbon in sugar during a process called chemical vapor deposition, a fancy term for heating the sugar up in a vacuum.
The key to me would be, what kind of capacity will this bring to the table and are we going to be chasing ants away from our cellphones and notebook computers. As technology increases there will be more and more materials and chemicals that will be used in increasingly strange ideas but then most of the advances in our society usually come from strange ideas like fish scales in lipstick for sparkle, and the very hungry person that thought fish eggs would be nice on a cracker bringing us caviar. What are your thoughts?
Written By:
Ken