Goodbye to charging your phone Developing a new battery that can last for four centuries without charging your mobile phone
Battery life is one of the biggest concerns for mobile phone manufacturers. Some brands like Apple have finally achieved very good numbers with the 4,674 mAh of the iPhone 16 Plus, but it is still not enough for many users looking for devices that they do not have to charge daily.
This problem extends to electric cars, computers, wearables and any household device with a battery. Autonomy decreases as battery materials degrade and useful life suffers after hundreds of full charge cycles, but the University of California (USA) has created a nearly infinite battery.
A student’s research could put an end to charging mobile phones with a battery that doesn’t drain or degrade. Mya Le Thai has been working on the project since 2016 with her team and has presented a prototype that supports 200,000 charging cycles that are already being tested under normal usage conditions.
This model can provide up to 400 years of autonomy without needing to charge the phone, which is unthinkable for current mobile phones that start to degrade after 300 and 500 charging cycles. The battery materials also showed no significant damage during subsequent tests.
The proposal by Mya Le Thai and her team of researchers is ambitious, to say the least. The nearly infinite battery would consist of gold-coated nanowires with manganese dioxide and an electrolyte gel as a transmitter.
The original intent was to increase the resistance of the cables in conventional batteries to achieve between 5,000 and 7,000 charge cycles. Mya Le Thai has achieved this far in excess of the 300 full charges supported by the batteries themselves.
During the experiment, the researchers discovered almost by accident that the nanobattery they created could withstand up to 200,000 full charge cycles in 3 months. Subsequent resistance tests of the material suggest that it could operate for up to four centuries without losing its health.